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I installed a release candidate of Quota Server 5.0 on an NT 4 Server system. After restarting the server (the software adds drivers that need a restart to take effect), the system was ready for me to define user quotas. Quotas are added with the client program, but the administrator does not need to open the client program first. Quota Server adds menu extensions to Microsoft Explorer--all I needed to do was right-click on the directory to which I wanted to add a quota and select the add/modify quota menu item. I then filled in and submitted the rest of the quota information, such as the size of the quota.

One of the new features in Quota Server 5.0 is the ability to add quotas to a specified directory automatically. For example, on my system I had the user home directories set up on D:\USERS with each user getting a directory with his or her own login name in this area. I quickly added quotas to all the users by using the Auto Dir quota type. As directories are added, they also get the specified quota. I also was able to modify or override the default quota for individual users for whom the default quota was not appropriate. And changing multiple quotas at once was no problem.

When it comes to deciding what to do when users reach their quotas, the administrator has three threshold levels with which to work. I was allowed to select what percentage of the quota takes effect at each level. For example, at level one I selected 75 percent, at level two I chose 90 percent and at level three I specified 100 percent. At each level the administrator is given several options that the program can take when the threshold is reached. These options include doing nothing (which makes monitoring disk usage easy), locking the directory, locking the directory and closed files, or locking the directory and all files. In addition to locking the directory, each threshold level also lets the administrator set different user and administrator notification options. These notifications can be any combination of sending a pop-up message, sending an e-mail message and/or running an external program.

Along with providing directory-based quotas, Quota Server can limit file usage per user on a volume. One thing to be aware of when dealing with users in the administrator's group: Files created by users in this group are not owned by the user, but by administrators. If you are thinking of limiting your administrative user's file space, you probably shouldn't do it with a user-based quota.

Rein In File Size

Quota Server can also put quotas on individual files. This can be useful for limiting the size of log files, for example. One great thing about this system is that once the file quota is set, if the file is deleted and recreated, the quota will remain in effect.

One would hope the program that created the log file would detect a log-file write failure and take action. This, of course, is completely up to the application writing the file. To help detect this before it happened, I set up the file quota to notify the administrative e-mail list when the log file reached 90 percent of its space allocation.

Block Those MP3s

Also new to Quota Server 5.0 is the ability to prevent specific file types from being saved. For example, it can be set to prevent MP3 files from being stored on the system. The only problem with this scheme is the program checks only the file extension type. A determined user could simply save the file with a different extension. And if the program that is used to open/play files can open files without regard to the extension, the user can create a loophole.

Enforcing quotas is only part of the management solution provided by Quota Server. Once the quotas are set, a good administrator also will keep tabs on the system. Quota Server provides a customizable reporting engine. Reports can be set up to run every so often (user-definable repeat time) and can be sent to a text file, through e-mail, or even exported into a database through ODBC.

Argent provides several templates for the reports. These include files without owners, quotas, volume usage, share usage and files modified since. All these reports have template files set up for HTML, text or a format ready for printing. Should the report templates not meet your needs, they can be modified. The base set of templates will get you basic information, but I think most administrators will want to customize or create their own reporting templates.

I set up the reporting engine to send an e-mail message each week with the quota usage summary in HTML format. If I had had a Web server running on this box, it would have been just as easy to have it create the file in the Web server's data directory.

James E. Drews is a network administrator for the CAE Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Send him your comments on this article at jdrews@ nwc.com.