Insuring your users do not take up excessive amounts of bandwidth and server storage space is a definite must for any NetWare administrator, especially in the education industry where students have the unique talent of downloading thousands of megabytes of seemingly useless information. To control what users do and how much they store on your servers a combination of two Netware products can be used, the first being the Netware baseline bundled with plenty of user management and quota management products. And for Larger systems the Novell Zenworks platform works equally as well with focus on a larger scale implementation.
Therefore when implementing a quota management system one can implement quotas either on a disk level or on a individual folder level. Or both this is especially useful in the education setting as a administrator can create one volume for students home directories and assign a quota of 80 gb to it. And also create student quotas for each folder there for no student will go over there quota and collectively the students will not exceed 80 gb, insuring double protection of the disk space.
Disk Quotas:
Disk Level Quota management is managed from the Novell imanager program, start by launching the admin portal at: https://<yourserverip>:8009/portal and login to the server using the admin user name and password, then enter the volume management section and click the disk management button under partition management as shown in the below figure
In this console window your disk management, pools and volumes are displayed and the option to quota is set to none by default click the quota link to assign a quota to any volume except the SYS volume which for expansion reasons should be left without a quota
Enter the desired quota and click on apply to apply it to the volume insuring that the quota is not over the size of the pool in which the volume is assigned
After clicking apply and confirming the volume will now be quoted to the specified size and your users cannot exceed the space prescribed.
User Quotas:
To manage user quotas the easiest way is to use Novell Console1 with the admin account; this will allow you to not only assign a space restriction to a single user or group but to also take advantage of the powerful template feature allowing you to assign a quota to all future users of the system. To access the user quota select the volume you wish to user quota, right click and click the properties button.
As the volume property page opens navigate to the users with space restrictions tab.
Click add and find the user or template that you want to restrict
Enter the user limitation in Kilobytes and click ok, upon confirming and clicking apply the user will have been assigned the quota and there collective saved files will not exceed the amount indicated. Also with this property the amount of space cannot exceed the volume restriction or the pool size.
For larger networks that use roaming profiles Zenworks for desktops will allow administrators to better control there user accounts and roaming profiles the Zenworks “store profile in home directory” propery must be enabled and the Windows Zenworks group policy editor must be enabled and functioning properly. This will allow administrators to control the size of there roaming profiles
These properties although inherently windows in nature will be applied through the Zen works middle tier server.
Monitoring Users with Novell
For large networks that include Zenworks and targeted windows user management
Users can be monitored in the same way as with windows systems, using a targeted log manager. However if the network does not employ zenworks then user monitoring will become useless as all the users will be logged in on the same account.
