[CentOS] OT how to prevent oversubscription of a disk

[Les Mikesell]

On 1/3/2011 1:39 PM, Dave wrote:
>
> So, is it fair to rephrase that as "ignore quotas, pay attention to
> actual usage"?
>
> I agree that some degree of oversubscription is probably desireable,
> and it would be much easier to just add storage whenever it looks to
> be getting fullish. My situation right now makes that difficult -
> budget is gone, so I can't add storage, and my users sometimes start
> up a big simulation that could potentially fill the disk right before
> the weekend. If the hoggy simulation crashes itself, that's okay, but
> if it brings down a lot of other jobs submitted by other users, I look
> bad. I guess even if there was some good tool support, this task is
> doomed to make everyone unhappy.

To take this in a slightly different direction, if all of your users 
more or less cooperate, you might slice out dedicated (real or virtual) 
resources to run jobs for them and add something like Hudson 
(http://hudson-ci.org/) to schedule/serialize the runs.  It is normally 
used to do 'continuous integration' builds whenever code changes in a 
source control system, but it can really control any jobs you want with 
a variety of triggers across multiple cross platform nodes.  With this 
approach it might be possible to share/reuse the same space, gathering 
the results at the end of the job instead of having users competing, 
each using up their own space.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com