XFS group and project quotas

XFS supports a quota system, that can handle quotas by user, group, or project. The project quota system is meant for setting quotas on directory hierarchies, e.g. you want to set quotas on users' home directories, but allow them a different quota in some shared directory.

What the documentation and the man page for xfs_quota(8) do not mention is that group quotas and project quotas are mutually exclusive. I.e. if you turn on group quotas on filesystem, you cannot turn on project quotas, and vice versa.

Here are my simple scripts for setting up XFS project quotas to set quotas on users' home directories: https://github.com/prehensilecode/xfs-project-quotas

Setting up a software RAID with sgdisk and mdadm

I wanted to set up a RAID0 (striped array) on two HDDs to servce as cache for Duplicity backups. And I wanted to use GPT and only command line tools: sgdisk(8) for partitioning, and mdadm(8) for creating the software RAID. (I have usually just used Gparted, a GUI partitioning tool.)

All of this was done on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5.

So, I have two (spinning disc) HDDs, each 931 GB, mounted as

• /dev/sda
• /dev/sdb

First, zap any partitioning information they may have. (In all the examples below, "X" should be replaced by "a" or "b".)

# sgdisk -Z /dev/sdX

Next, partition them. The partitions have to be of type 0xFD00 "Linux RAID". You can do "sgdisk -L" to see a list of all available types. These type codes are not the same as the type codes used by fdisk(8).

The partitions will be 512 GB, leaving some for other uses.

# sgdisk -n 0:0:+512G -c 0:"cache" -t 0:0xFD00 /dev/sdX
# sgdisk -n 0:0:0 -c 0:"misc" /dev/sdX

The "0" first digit of the argument to "-n", "-c", and "-t" is shorthand for the first available partition number. In this case, the first line would be "1" and the second line would be "2". (N.B. this is automatically set; "1" and "2" do not need to be used in the commandline.)

In the second line, note that "-n 0:0:0" uses the default of starting at the first unallocated sector, and ending at the last allocateable sector on the drive, thereby using up the rest of the HDD for the "misc" partition 2.  Leaving out the type specification, "-t", gives the default 0x8300 "Linux filesystem."

Print out the partition info to check:

# sgdisk -p /dev/sdX
Disk /dev/sdX: 1953525168 sectors, 931.5 GiB
Logical sector size: 512 bytes
Disk identifier (GUID): xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-xxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Partition table holds up to 128 entries
First usable sector is 34, last usable sector is 1953525134
Partitions will be aligned on 2048-sector boundaries
Total free space is 2014 sectors (1007.0 KiB)

Number  Start (sector)    End (sector)  Size       Code  Name
   1            2048      1073743871   512.0 GiB   FD00  cache
   2      1073743872      1953525134   419.5 GiB   8300  misc









And we see that it has done what we expected.

Next, we create the RAID0 from /dev/sda1 and /dev/sdb1:

# mdadm -v -C /dev/md/mycomputer:cache -l stripe -n 2 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1

This creates a device /dev/md127 with a symbolic link for the readable name:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2017-10-18 18:11:31 -0400 /dev/md/mycomputer:cache -> ../md127

In mdadm v3.3.4 in RHEL6, I found that the name given to the "-C/--create" option would always end up being "mycomputer:something", where "something" was determined by what you actually give it. This name comes up after reboot.

The "-v" is for verbose output, "-l" is for the RAID level (which can be specified by integer, or string), "-n" is the number of devices, and the positional arguments are a list of the devices to be used.

Also, the integer N in /dev/mdN is determined by the system. It seems to start with 127.

For instance, doing

# mdadm -C /dev/md0

after rebooting gave this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2017-10-18 18:11:31 -0400 /dev/md/mycomputer:0 -> ../md127 

And doing

# mdadm -C /dev/md/cache 

gave

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 8 2017-10-18 18:11:31 -0400 /dev/md/mycomputer:cache -> ../md127

I wised up on my third time through, and named it what it was going to pick, anyway.

The RAID needs to be "assembled" and activated at boot time. This is not done by default. To do this, a file /etc/mdadm.conf must be created. (Other distros may have a different location for this file.)

Assuming there is no such file, start by using mdadm(8) to output the array specification to the file:

# mdadm -Ds /dev/md/mycomputer:cache > /etc/mdadm.conf
# cat /etc/mdadm.conf
ARRAY /dev/md/mycomputer:cache metadata=1.2 name=mycomputer:cache UUID=xxxxxxxx

Very important: this UUID will not be the same as the UUID of the filesystem we will create later.

Add DEVICE, MAILADDR, and AUTO lines to /etc/mdadm.conf, resulting in:

DEVICE /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1
MAILADDR myname@myemail.net
AUTO +all
ARRAY /dev/md/mycomputer:cache metadata=1.2 name=mycomputer:cache UUID=xxxxxxxx

I did the next bit in single-user mode as I wanted this to be mounted as /var/cache, which is also used by several other things. Also, since it gets tiresome writing out the whole device name, I used the short name /dev/md127.

# telinit 1
# mkfs.ext4 /dev/md127

Next, I mounted the device in a temporary location to transfer the existing contents:

# mkdir /mnt/tmpmnt
# mount /dev/md127 /mnt/tmpmnt
# cd /var/cache
# tar cf - * | ( cd /mnt/tmpmnt ; tar xvf - )

Get the UUID of this new filesystem for use in /etc/fstab:

# blkid /dev/md127
yyyyyyyyy-yyyyyyyy-yyyyyyyyyy-yyyyyyyyy

And create an entry in /etc/fstab:

UUID=yyyyyyyyy-yyyyyyyy-yyyyyyyyyy-yyyyyyyyy  /var/cache  ext4   defaults    0 2

And reboot!