WinServer 2003 / AD / Quotas

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fhey

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 5, 2005
Messages
152
Greetings all,

I was wondering if anyone happened to have a solution for this particular problem. Last summer I converted my work network from an aging Novell Netware 6.5 network to an Active Directory structure running on Windows Server 2003 R2.

I've had everything working for a good 8 months and now that I know the base is working I've been trying to tweak it to get other features the way I want them.

I've had quotas set up for some time now - through the File Server Management tool. All users are however on soft quotas and are greatly abusing this. Getting tired of manually trimming their files so the server can actually back-up at night I've determined to fix the quota system into hard quotas - so they cannot exceed their allotments. Why I haven't done this yet though is that they have no way of knowing how much space they've used and whether they are about to exceed or approach their hard quota limit - which isn't exactly fair to them.

Now - I've seen the nice warning system that you can set in the quota management - when they hit certain levels you define.. ex: 90% it emails them. Problem being of course that A) My server is not setup for SMTP and I'd really like to avoid this at all costs and B) The users don't have e-mail addresses anyway.

Anyone have any ideas of a way to script a warning to them when they hit certain usage amounts? I saw something sort of promising in the quota management system - on the same window that you can setup the e-mail warning there is a spot where you can possibly run a command. Theoretically this could run a command or script or batch file that could possibly send a message to the user? Though I'm uncertain of this being true and how to deal with it if it IS true.

Even better I would like an application that sits in the system tray of the client machine and simply measures usage of their home directory vs an upper limit. I can see a few problems with this idea - but it'd be handy in the sense they'd have a constant warning of usage levels.

Now, I've seen a few applications that do something close to this - though they come at a rather dreadful price.

Any ideas out there?

Thanky~
 
In my experience, even with warnings, they will just ignore them. The only way they will "play by the rules" is if you force them to by setting hard limits.
 
I do want to put hard quotas - I just want them to be warned so they don't hit their 100% and wonder what the heck happened.
 
But i thought setting up Quotas will give user popup error massage in their windows that they are about to reach their limit and will not allow them to install or go above limit ?
 
Unfortunately the only warning received on my system is when they hit 100% and that's simply because they'll get the basic Windows error saying that there's not enough available disk space to accomplish whatever they were trying to copy or save.
 
The plot unfortunately thickens as well. I've noticed this morning that when they delete files out of their account it goes into a "RECYCLER" folder that is invisible to them - and thus unfortunately doesn't actually free up space.

I'm told I could possibly put in a logout script hooked to their GPO to delete it - though it would run with their permission level I believe - and if it is already invisible to them I could see that being a problem...
 
If they have a mapped drive letter to their home drive, it should show as xx% full in the my computer screen. If that is the case, you could probably use one of the several programs that graphically show disk usage. I used to use a program called Samurize years ago to show disk usage on my machine + several of my servers - it was very easy to configure and relied on PerfMon (built in windows performance monitoring - monitors sevearl things, but logical disk - %free space is what specifically you're looking for - you may have to point it to \\servername though.)

it looks like Samurize is still being developed - http://www.samurize.com/
 
fhey said:
The plot unfortunately thickens as well. I've noticed this morning that when they delete files out of their account it goes into a "RECYCLER" folder that is invisible to them - and thus unfortunately doesn't actually free up space.

I'm told I could possibly put in a logout script hooked to their GPO to delete it - though it would run with their permission level I believe - and if it is already invisible to them I could see that being a problem...
Click to expand...

If they empty their recyle bin on their local computer do these files disappear (this is the way it works on my company's network)
 
Interesting idea - I'll check out that prog in a bit. They do indeed have their home paths on the server mounted as I:\ as well as my document redirection.

The unfortunate part of the recycling bin is my own over-zealousness with lock-down GPOs is they've got no recycle bin (no desktop icons, no right clicking, only a pre-determined Start Menu Path).

I'm the NA for a high school - so unfortunately I have alot of hostile users who will use any sort of power to bring down the machine so they don't have to learn or in a few cases so far - just to be spiteful. The vast majority of my students are semi-responsible of course, but unfortunately we've alot of troubled ones with disturbing levels of knowledge and not near enough instructor supervision - so I have to keep everything locked down past where I'd want to normally.
 
Found an interesting answer to fix your file deletion problem - used in login/logout scripts - here

arrtib -s -h "\\server\userdocuments\%username%\my documents\recycler"
echo Y | rd /s "\\server\userdocuments\%username%\my documents\recycler"
arrtib -s -h c:\recycler
echo Y | rd /s c:\recycler

I think you could probably set up a "refresh" link on our samurize profile that could run the script on demand.
 
ah hah.. intriguing - I'll definitely give that one a try tomorrow. I've been playing with the samurize program and was able to make a corner of their desktop constantly display how much space they have remaining without screwing up anything. I just need to find a way to see if I can package & distribute the sam program / file now to about 700 computers =P But at least it's a place to start. At the very least I can make it part of the image and deploy it in the summer.

Your solutions are helping - thanks for your efforts :)
 
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