Using quotas/lvm's to isolate application disk usage

[Kenneth Holter]

Thank you for your reply.

Our application areas are typically accessed by the application itself, plus
a small number of admins. So maybe quotas is the way to go, and leave
LVM-ing out of the picture. But could you please elaborate some more on your
thoughts regarding LVM-ing versus LVM-ing+quotas versus quotas? I'd like to
understand more about the pros and cons of the different approaches.

Regards not placing quotas on /var: I do see your point about letting the
apps log as much as they need. For servers with plenty of disc capacity this
is clearly an option. But I'd be much more comfortable with having some
control over /var, so that one misbehaving app would not be able to take
down other apps by filling up the /var partition. Is this where your cron
job fits in the picture? What kind of script are we talking about?


Kenneth


On 6/11/09, George Magklaras <georgios at biotek.uio.no> wrote:
>
> 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
>>
>
>
>
>
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