Activating or reinitializing quotas

About activating or reinitializing quotas

You use the quota on command to activate or reinitialize quotas. The following list outlines some facts you should know about activating or reinitializing quotas:

You activate or reinitialize quotas for only one volume at a time.
Your /etc/quotas file does not need to be free of all errors to activate quotas. Invalid entries are reported and skipped. If the /etc/quotas file contains any valid entries, quotas are activated.
Reinitialization causes the quota file to be scanned and all quotas for that volume to be recalculated.
Changes to the /etc/quotas file do not take effect until either quotas are reinitialized or the quota resize command is issued.
Quota reinitialization can take some time, during which storage system data is available, but quotas are not enforced for the specified volume.
Quota reinitialization is performed asynchronously by default; other commands can be performed while the reinitialization is proceeding in the background.
Note
This means that errors or warnings from the reinitialization process could be interspersed with the output from other commands.
Quota reinitialization can be invoked synchronously with the -w option; this is useful if you are reinitializing from a script.
Errors and warnings from the reinitialization process are logged to the console as well as to /etc/messages.
Note
For more information about when to use the quota resize command versus the quota on command after changing the quota file, see Modifying quotas.

CIFS requirement for activating quotas

If the /etc/quotas file contains user quotas that use Windows IDs as targets, CIFS must be running before you can activate or reinitialize quotas.

Quota initialization terminated by upgrade

Any quota initialization running when the storage system is upgraded is terminated and must be manually restarted from the beginning. For this reason, you should allow any running quota initialization to complete before upgrading your storage system.

Activating quotas

To activate quotas, complete the following step.

Step	Action
1	Enter the following command: quota on [-w] vol_name The `-w` option causes the command to return only after the entire /etc/quotas file has been scanned (synchronous mode). This is useful when activating quotas from a script. Example The following example turns on quotas on a volume named cad: quota on cad

Step

Action

Enter the following command:

quota on [-w] vol_name

The -w option causes the command to return only after the entire /etc/quotas file has been scanned (synchronous mode). This is useful when activating quotas from a script.

Example

The following example turns on quotas on a volume named cad:

quota on cad

Reinitializing quotas

To reinitialize quotas, complete the following steps.

Step	Action
1	If quotas are already on for the volume you want to reinitialize quotas on, enter the following command: quota off vol_name
2	Enter the following command: quota on vol_name

Step

Action

If quotas are already on for the volume you want to reinitialize quotas on, enter the following command:

quota off vol_name

Enter the following command:

quota on vol_name

Deactivating quotas

To deactivate quotas, complete the following step.

Step	Action
1	Enter the following command: quota off vol_name Example The following example turns off quotas on a volume named cad: quota off cad Note If a quota initialization is almost complete, the `quota off` command can fail. If this happens, retry the command after a minute or two.

Canceling quota initialization

To cancel a quota initialization that is in progress, complete the following step.

Step	Action
1	Enter the following command: quota off vol_name Note If a quota initialization is almost complete, the `quota off` command can fail. In this case, the initialization scan is already complete.