Using quotas/lvm's to isolate application disk usage

[George Magklaras]

In an environment where users and groups change frequently, LVM-ing the 
different apps on different LVs makes a difference. I have seen examples 
of people that even script LVing user home areas, hence isolating and 
reducing the needs for file size and inode quotas. For groupareas (many 
people, same group, lots of disk space) LVM plus quotas is recommended.

I don't think it's a good idea to place quotas on /var (process gets out 
of control with debug options on and you end up loosing the logs for the 
particular process/uid that dumps the log file). Just make sure you have 
plenty of disk space (spread them on RAID 0 if you have backup on /var) 
and make sure you script a size/inode control per directory with cron...

That's what we do here.

GM

-- 
--
George Magklaras BSc Hons MPhil
RHCE:805008309135525

Senior Computer Systems Engineer/UNIX-Linux Systems Administrator
EMBnet Technical Management Board
The Biotechnology Centre of Oslo,
University of Oslo
http://folk.uio.no/georgios


Kenneth Holter wrote:
> Hi.
> 
> 
> We've got a bunch of servers running different third party applications.
> Currently there are little or no control with regards to which file systems
> the applications are install on and which file systems contains the dynamic
> files such as log files and dump files. Some applications have separate data
> file systems, while others write to the same file system that contains the
> binaries. With this kind of setup, one single application can cause serious
> trouble for all the other applications, when the application fills up the
> shared file systems.
> 
> What I'd like to do is force all the different application admins to
> configure their apps to install the binaries in for example /opt, and make
> sure that all logs and such are placed in /var. For /var I'm thinking each
> app will have its own folder, maybe also placed on separete mount
> points (logical volumes). Alternativly, I could set up quotas on /var, or
> even a combination of LVMs and quotas (so that the app admins are notified
> when the file system is more or less full, but not quite).
> 
> Is there any best practice documents on this subject? I'd really appreciate
> some input on how to go about increasing the isolation between the different
> app (with regards to disk usage).
> 
> 
> Regards,
> Kenneth Holter