topic Re: NFS home dirs as individual qtree or folder? in Network and Storage Protocols

NFS home dirs as individual qtree or folder?

pflum — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 23:44:04 GMT

I'm setting up individual user home dirs to be automounted under linux, so NFS (we're using cmode if it matters). I don't know wether to setup the home dirs as individual qtrees per person (ex: /home_vol/qtree_username), or a single homedire qtree where everyone has a folder (ex: /vol1/home_qtree/username). I've seen this done both ways, and I don't really know if one's better than the other. I feel like the per user qtree is more flexible, but a bigger pain to manage. Any thoughts/advice?

Re: NFS home dirs as individual qtree or folder?

waynemcc — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 18:58:46 GMT

Are you going to have user quotas? If so, how do you want to manage them?

Who provisions the home directories? Do they have access to create qtrees?

I think the answers to those will te

Re: NFS home dirs as individual qtree or folder?

richard_payne — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 19:42:08 GMT

I've always stayed away from creating a qtree per-user. It always seemed like a lot more overhead for each user vs just creating them as a subdirectory of a qtree.

I don't know how many users you are talking about but the max qtrees per-volume may be an issue.

--rdp

Re: NFS home dirs as individual qtree or folder?

pflum — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 21:36:32 GMT

@waynemcc wrote:
Are you going to have user quotas? If so, how do you want to manage them?

Who provisions the home directories? Do they have access to create qtrees?

Yes, we'll be setting a single quota for every user. My thinking is that a per qtree quota is easier to diagnose since it's contained. If it's per user, and if it's spread across multiple folders, that's much harder for the end user to figure out, and takes assistance, which I'd like to avoid. Either way, quotas will be setup, and the management will likely be done by me or a colleague, and only with proper justification from the user.

I wrote a script for qtree creation on the home volume, and created a role to limit perms. It'll be run by the helpdesk during user creation.

Re: NFS home dirs as individual qtree or folder?

pflum — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 21:38:39 GMT

@pflum wrote:
Either way, quotas will be setup, and the management will likely be done by me or a colleague, and only with proper justification from the user.

To clarify that, a single blanket quota will be setup, i.e. the day you start, you get XX capacity, and that's all you're going to get w/o good justifcation.