User Quotas in Windows 2003???

[aceman817]

Once again I'll try to keep this as simple as possible. At the middle school where I work part-time, we have a nice IBM xSeries Windows 2003 machine that is simply a member of a neighboring domain (a local high school's domain). It belongs to our school and we have complete control over it. We are trying to setup individual user folders for all our 2000 students (it's a big middle school) so they may save their documents. I have previously devised a few batch files that worked nicely on an NT machine. The batch files created the users, made the directories, and assigned the appropriate permissions to each folder. I'm pretty sure that I'll be able to use a similar approach on the 2003 server, but I definitely need to find a way to limit the allowable disk space of each user folder. How can I effectively do this from a script? We have around 100 gigs to work with so we are planning on allocating about 50MB to each student folder. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!

 

[Penth]

Windows 2003 Server has Disk Quotas built in. Right click on a drive and go to properties. There is a quota tab you can enable. I'm sure you just need to add each user to a group. Also... 100GB for 2000 users? That must be some budget you are on.

 

[aceman817]

Do you know of a tutorial on how to do this? If I add all the users to a group called "student", can I simply set the quota for the entire group. I'm not sure how to do this. I know that there is a "quota" tab on each drive in "My Computer." I'm not sure what you mean by your last comment. Is 50MB not enough to save Word, Excel, Access and other text documents?

 

[Green Man]

In windows 2000 / I'm not positive this applies to 2003 / quotas only apply to users, not to groups. So you click on the quota tab, create the quota, set a warning level if you want, set the limit, check the box to deny disk space to users that exceed the limit. Then click on the quota entries button and add entries for each user that you want to be able to exceed the limit...like administrator, system, whatever. Then you are done.

 

[aceman817]

Green Man, I think Windows 2003 is the same. I will check into that the next time I'm on campus. If the quotas need to be added to each user, I have no problem with that as long as it can be automated for 2000 users. I will not be typing in quotas for 2000 users!!!

 

[aceman817]

I just came across a program by Symantec (Veritas) called StorageExec. It seems like it does everything I need it to and more including advanced reports, file type restrictions, etc. Does anyone have experience with this program?

 

[Penth]

I've never used StorageExec. You might want to check out this article though. Text

 

[Green Man]

Originally posted by: aceman817
Green Man, I think Windows 2003 is the same. I will check into that the next time I'm on campus. If the quotas need to be added to each user, I have no problem with that as long as it can be automated for 2000 users. I will not be typing in quotas for 2000 users!!!

Quotas don't have to be added for each user. Only exceptions to the quota.