User has managed to exceed their disk quota

[studentwebhosting]

Hello,

Firstly, I'm new here so I'm not sure if this has been answered before or if it is in the correct section - I have searched the forums though.

I've been looking through my accounts list and I have a user with a 50Mb disk space quota and 214Mb of space used - so they've used over 400% of their quota.

Business wise I can sort it out but I was just wondering *why* it has happened and how I can stop it from happening again?

It seems a little odd - could it be that something is being misrepresented? or that the user has managed to upload a lot more stuff than they should be allowed to?

Sam

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[hormigo]

try this:
/scripts/fixquotas

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[studentwebhosting]

Originally posted by hormigo
try this:
/scripts/fixquotas

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I tried this just after I made the post. It ran ok but I don't know if it has worked or not as there's still excess file space used up - presuming that everything is respresented correctly and the user had uploaded too many files.

Does anyone know why it has done this? The quotas were right to begin with so it shouldn't have been possible.

Any ideas gratefully accepted.

Thanks

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[Pilgrim]

To verify if he is really using 400% or if it is just a technical cpanel glitch log into ssh, go to /home/username and do a du -h
Look at the final number. This will show you how much diskspace the account really uses.

I'm working on two similar cases myself right now. In both cases cpanel just reports it wrong. Actual diskspace used is much lower.

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[ciphervendor]

This could be caused by files erroneously owned by the user you're seeing this increased space by. Simply run the following to see all files owned by a specific user:

find . -user USERNAME -print | more

Hit space bar to sift through the results. If you find anything out of the users' home directory, this is probably where the extra space is being consumed.

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[Angel78]

were you doing backup? it also counts against users webspace

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[studentwebhosting]

Originally posted by Angel78
were you doing backup? it also counts against users webspace

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I do have backups set to go onto a second hard drive each night - does that still count?

I'll try those other ideas in a min

Sam

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[ciphervendor]

Backups shouldn't count towards user quota. You can check this by doing the following (assuming your backup drive is labeled backup)

grep backup /etc/fstab

A basic backup drive line should look something like:

/deve/sdb1 /backup ext3 defaults 1 2

If you see some stuff in there about usrquota or grpquota, you may want to remove those things to stop backups from being entered into quota.

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[studentwebhosting]

Well it doesn't seem to be anything to do with the backups. All seems present and correct there - according to the post above.

When I did the "du - h" the final number was 282M so I presume they've managed to use up too much space somehow.

I couldn't get the "find" method to do anything.

The user still hasn't responded to my email about removing some of their files - guess I'll just have to suspend the account (that usually gets their attention)

Thanks for your help

Sam

(I still don't understand how they were allowed access to that much space in the first place)

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