Our users are often unaware of their home directory disk usage and get surprised where they are over their assigned disk quota and cannot write anymore. The script, that follows, is placed in the system /etc/profile.d directory with the name homequota.sh. It checks disk usage and displays information about disk space available under user’s quota. Read the rest of this entry »
Backing up large filesystems with very large numbers of files and directories is challenging. I routinely deal with 20-40TB filesystems with millions, sometimes tens of millions, of files. Filesystem with Unix home directories in a place with large number of users is an example of such a filesystem. The problem is more of backup speed than capacity.
Some commercial backup packages can do a better job here, but if you rely on free backup solutions, the situation is a bit more challenging. I have tried quite a few open-source backup programs, and performance of most of them is not acceptable in this type of environment. However, I have identified a few approaches which performance comes as acceptable, barely acceptable but acceptable from my perspective. Read the rest of this entry »
When one runs non-RHEL linux on modern Dell servers, disk monitoring is a bit of a challenge. Dell’s OpenManage is a fine tool, but it cannot be run on non-RHEL versions of linux. So, how can one monitor health of hard drives when OpenManage is not an option?
An actual approach depends on the storage controller in use on the server.
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