[gpfsug-discuss] Quotas and non-existant users

[Jonathan Buzzard]

On Wed, 2014-11-26 at 10:14 +0000, Laurence Alexander Hurst wrote:
> Hmm, mmrepquota is reporting no files owned by any of the users in
> question.  I¹ll see if `find` disagrees.
>   They have the default fileset
> user quotas applied, so they¹re not users we¹ve edited to grant quota
> extensions to.  We have had a problem (which IBM have acknowledged, iirc)
> whereby it is not possible to reset a user¹s quota back to the default if
> it has been modified, perhaps this is related?  I¹ll see if `find` turns
> anything up or I¹ll raise a ticket with IBM and see what they think.
> 
> I¹ve pulled out a single example, but all 75 users I have are the same.
> 
> mmrepquota gpfs | grep 8695
> 8695       nbu        USR               0          0 5368709120          0
>     none |        0       0        0        0     none
> 8695       bb         USR               0          0 1073741824          0
>     none |        0       0        0        0     none
> 

While the number of files and usage is zero look at those "in doubt"
numbers. Until these also fall to zero then the users are not going to
disappear from the quota reporting would be my guess. Quite why the "in
doubt" numbers are still so large is another question. I have vague
recollections of this happening to me when I deleted large amounts of
data belonging to a user down to zero when I was clearing the file
system up I mentioned before. Though to be honest most of my clearing up
was identifying who the files really belonged to (there had in the
distance past been a change of usernames; gone from local usernames to
using the university wide ones and not everyone had claimed their files.
All related to a move to using Active Directory) and doing chown's on
the data.

I think what happens is when the file number goes to zero the quota
system stops updating for that user and if there is anything "in doubt"
it never gets updated and sticks around forever.

Might be worth creating a couple of files for the user in the
appropriate filesets and then give it a bit of time and see if the
output of mmrepquota matches what you believe is the real case. If this
works and the "in doubt" number goes to zero I would at this point do a
chown to a different user that is not going away and then delete the
files.

Something else to consider is that they might be in an ACL somewhere
which is confusing the quota system.


JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                 Email: jonathan (at) buzzard.me.uk
Fife, United Kingdom.