Hi: In the process of debugging a variety of quota problems visible in procmail-based mail delivery and qpopper-based mail pickup, I believe I've identified an interaction problem between chown and quota. Essentially, if a program running as superuser creates/appends/edits a file which would put the user over soft quota, and then chown's it to the appropriate user, the user is considered over soft quota with NO grace period. I've already found this to be problematic in the following situations:
1) I use sendmail with procmail as the local delivery agent. If an incoming message would put the user over soft quota, the message is returned undeliverable with the message "overquota". IMHO, this shouldn't happen unless the user would exceed hard quota or has expired his/her grace period. The tricky part is I use a perl script run out of cron to notify people if they're over quota...unfortunately I notify via email. 2) I use qpopper to offer email to our customers. Quotas are enforced (10M soft, 21M hard) on the /var partition, which therefore limits both the user's mailbox and the corresponding copy which qpopper creates beneath /var/spool/pop . Since the user's mailbox can't exceed 10M (see problem 1, above), the user can't (easily) exceed 20M of disk usage while qpopper has the /var/spool/pop/username.pop file in use, so the user can't exceed their hard quota. Some of our users are unable to POP their mail because of the following error: Apr 1 13:15:59 webhost in.qpopper[8981]: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: -ERR Unable to copy mail spool file, quota exceeded (122) Obviously, something isn't right. Are there any patches/fixes that I can apply? Should I file a bug, and if so, against which package? If anyone wants further information, please email. TIA! tcsh# dpkg -s qpopper Package: qpopper Status: install ok installed Priority: extra Section: mail Installed-Size: 110 Maintainer: Miquel van Smoorenburg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Version: 2.2-4 tcsh# dpkg -s procmail Package: procmail Status: install ok installed Priority: standard Section: mail Installed-Size: 209 Maintainer: Santiago Vila <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Version: 3.10.4-2 tcsh# dpkg -s quota Package: quota Status: install ok installed Priority: optional Section: admin Installed-Size: 118 Maintainer: Heiko Schlittermann <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Version: 1.55-8 tcsh# dpkg -s fileutils Package: fileutils Essential: yes Status: install ok installed Priority: required Section: base Installed-Size: 1011 Maintainer: Galen Hazelwood <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Version: 3.16-2 Pete -- Peter J. Templin, Jr. Systems and Networks Administrator JD-WEB Computer Sales and Service 429 Market St. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Lewisburg, PA 17837 (717)523-6800 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]