Emulab FAQ: Using the Testbed: How much permanent disk is available for my files?

Emulab provides a reasonable amount of disk space on users.emulab.net for experimenters to store files. There are several directory trees you have access to. Remember, all of these directories can be accessed on your experimental nodes via NFS.

  • /proj: Every project gets a sub directory in /proj. This is the primary location in which you should store files needed by your experiments and/or results from your experiments.
  • /groups: Every project subgroup gets a sub directory in /groups. If you have files that need to be restricted to just your subgroup members, place them here.
  • /users: Every user gets a home directory in /users. Your home directory is not the place to store project files.

Since we have many experimenters, all wanting more disk space then we physically have, we run quotas on all filesystems to prevent users from filling up the disks. To see how big your quota is on each filesystem, simply run the quota command on users.emulab.net: 

	users$ quota
	Disk quotas for user leebee (uid 30379): 
	     Filesystem   usage   quota   limit   grace   files   quota   limit   grace
	         /users      54   50000   60000              25       0       0
	             /q  967226 2000000 2500000           30348       0       0

You will notice several important facts about the above quota display.

  • Your diskspace resides on users.emulab.net. To delete files when overquota, log into users.emulab.net.
  • Quotas are displayed in 1K byte blocks.
  • Quotas are per-user, not per-project or per-group. Just joining a new project or group isn't going to get you any more disk space!
  • You have a seperate quota on each physical filesystem. Note however that this does not necessarily mean a seperate quota for each of /users, /proj and /groups.
  • You have a very small quota on /users, which is intended to encourage users to use the project disk space in /proj.
  • On the current Utah Emulab fileserver, /proj and /groups are actually symlinks to directories on /q, and there your quota is much larger than on /users.

If you find that your existing quota is not big enough for your needs, please send email to testbed-ops explaining your needs.