Storage · intermediate

User jdoe says a colleague at 'the same usage' was blocked from writing, but jdoe can still write to /lustre. Based on the quota report below, what is jdoe's actual situation?

$ lfs quota -u jdoe /lustre
Disk quotas for usr jdoe (uid 5023):
     Filesystem   kbytes      quota      limit    grace   files    quota    limit  grace
        /lustre 5242880000* 5000000000 6000000000 6d23h55m 182931  1000000  1200000     -

The options

• Ajdoe is already past the 6 TB hard limit, so the very next write fails immediately; the grace timer shown is only counting down to when the account is locked out
• BThe asterisk indicates that quota accounting on this target has become corrupted and must be rebuilt with lfs quotacheck before writes succeed again, so the reported usage cannot be trusted
• Cjdoe has exceeded the soft (block) quota and is inside the grace period; writes keep working until the grace timer expires or usage hits the 6 TB hard limit, after which writes fail with EDQUOT
• Djdoe has exceeded the file-count quota, so no new files can be created while appends to files that already exist keep succeeding, which is what blocked the colleague

The answer

C. jdoe has exceeded the soft (block) quota and is inside the grace period; writes keep working until the grace timer expires or usage hits the 6 TB hard limit, after which writes fail with EDQUOT

Why

The asterisk on the kbytes column marks usage over the soft quota (5 TB), and the running grace countdown (6d23h55m) shows the window in which jdoe may keep writing before the soft limit becomes enforced; the hard limit (6 TB) is the absolute ceiling at any time. The colleague was likely past grace or at their hard limit. The asterisk is a standard over-soft-quota flag, not corruption, and jdoe's inode usage (182,931 of 1,000,000) is well under the file quota, whose grace column is empty.

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