On Thu, May 18, 2006 at 11:42:58AM -0700, Charlie wrote: > Sorry to revive such an old thread.. but I'm struggling here. > > I really want to use zfs. Fssnap, SVM, etc all have drawbacks. But I > work for a University, where everyone has a quota. I'd literally have > to create > 10K partitions. Is that really your intention?
Yes. You'd group them all under a single filesystem in the hierarchy, allowing you to manage NFS share options, compression, and more from a single control point. > Of course, backups become a huge pain now. below, that's cumbersome > for both backups and (especially) restores. Using traditional tools or ZFS send/receive? We are working on RFEs for recursive snapshots, send, and recv, as well as preserving DSL properties as part of a 'send', which should make backups of large filesystem hierarchies much simpler. > Why can't we just have user quotas in zfs? :) The fact that per-user quotas exist is really a historical artifact. With traditional filesystems, it is (effectively) impossible to have a filesystem per user. The filesystem is a logical administrative control point, allowing you to view usage, control properties, perform backups, take snapshots etc. For home directory servers, you really want to do these operations per-user, so logically you'd want to equate the two (filesystem = user). Per-user quotas (the most common use of quotas, but not the only one) were introduced because multiple users had to share the same filesystem. ZFS quotas are intentionally not associated with a particular user because a) it's the logical extension of "filesystems as control point", b) it's vastly simpler to implement and, most importantly, c) separates implementation from adminsitrative policy. ZFS quotas can be set on filesystems which may represent projects, groups, or any other abstraction, as well as on entire portions of the hierarchy. This allows them to be combined in ways that traditional per-user quotas cannot. Hope that helps, - Eric -- Eric Schrock, Solaris Kernel Development http://blogs.sun.com/eschrock _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
