How to set default user quota in zfs filesystem

Question

I know how to set ZFS quota for users(ex:zfs set userquota@username=10GB), But I don't know how to set the userquota for every user default?

Answer 1

In normal filesystem quota management (edquota), there was no option to set a default user quota. So, while ZFS makes quota management easier, it also doesn't have this concept. Though the addition of group quotas is interesting.

On our legacy fileserver, our user provisioning script would call edquota to define the initial 'default' quotas for users. Which was achieved by creating a perl script to make the appropriate changes to a quota template (since we have multiple home directories and project spaces that users can get placed in), and defining the EDITOR environment variable to be this perl script. I could see us replacing the use of multiple home directories and project directories, by using group quotas. Just need to come up with a way to migrate users that have sunacls to POSIX acls in their directories, etc.

With ZFS being just a command line, it should be much easier to script into some sort of user provisioning script.

On my FreeBSD mailhost server, I already have a 'mkuser' script. Which takes an arg of username, and is passed password crypt (MD5) in stdin (calls 'pw user add' with '-H 0'), since we have a central identity management system (which sends my server 'events' to provision users and deprovision users, the latter isn't automated anymore...since there have been changes to mail retention, and problems with getting incorrect deprovision events...)

The script then creates an initial maildir for the user. Otherwise they would get an error accessing the account until they receive their first email. (though for years we just kept telling users that the login error is because they haven't received any mail yet.) If we were to impose quotas on maildirs, it would be simple enough to add the 'zfs' command for this to the script.

Answer 2

Had this same question and search brought me here so I figured I'd answer for the next time I have the same question and end up here again.

From the Sun ZFS docs.

Setting Default User and Group Quotas

Starting in the Oracle Solaris 11.3 release, you can set a default user quota or a default group quota that is applied automatically for anyone who does not have a specific quota defined. Similar to specific user and group quotas, default user and group quotas are not inheritable to descendent file systems. In addition, if a default user or group quota is set on a top-level file system, space consumed in descendent file systems is not charged to the top-level file system's default quota.

You can set a default user quota on a large shared file system. For example:

$ zfs set defaultuserquota=30gb students/labstaff/admindata

Using a default user quota on a large shared file system allows you to restrict growth without specifying individual user quotas. You can also monitor who is using the top-level file system.

$ zfs userspace students/labstaff/admindata
TYPE        NAME     USED  QUOTA  SOURCE   
POSIX User  admin1  2.00G    30G  default  
POSIX User  admin2  4.00G    30G  default  
POSIX User  root       3K    30G  default<code>

Per group quotas are also available and documented in the same document.