Sometimes, you’re hard drive isn’t working as you expect. Or sometimes, you wonder if your hard drive is in good health. Since 2003, manufacturers integrate a system to monitor predictable failures directly on hard drive.It helps companies, but also individuals to be alerted when the hard disk goes to death! A good guide to understand what is predictable or not : PC Tech Guide.

This technology, S.M.A.R.T (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) is embedded on the device. We’ll explain how to get enable S.M.A.R.T. on hard drives, then check the disk to get errors.

In the following example, let assume the device we need to check is /dev/sda

• Install – if you don’t have it

# apt-get install smartmontools 

• Check the status

# smartctl -i /dev/sda 
smartctl version 5.37 [i686-pc-linux-gnu] Copyright (C) 2002-6 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family:     Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 family
Device Model:     Maxtor 6Y080M0

Continuer la lecture de « SMART – Take the control »

Managing quota is not so simple, but it’s important to save place when you use multi-user system to avoid abuses.

• Install quota

 # apt-get install quota

• Enable quota

To enable  quota, we need to give « rights » to quota to manage a filesystem. So we need to add an option when mouting a disk :

# vi /etc/fstab 
/dev/sda3    /home    ext3    defaults,usrquota    0    0 
# reboot

I added usrquota as option to the disk, but we can also define group restriction with grpquota

finally, To apply options, reboot is required (well, easier and I didn’t search another way to apply it)

• Manage quota for user

Continuer la lecture de « Quota »