Setting a Group Disk Quota

[Larry S]

I'd like to limit the amount of disk space that an entire group may use on a
Windows 2003 server. I wish to avoid using a 3rd party product such as
Northern Quota Server to accomplish this. I believe it could be done
through a group policy setting. I've downloaded the Windows 2003 resource
kit and the group policy tools. I haven't found anything obvious to make
this setting. Ultimately I'd like to program in VB the settings for group
disk quotas using ADSI, WMI, or some other Microsoft SDK.

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide or reference you can
direct me to,
Larry S.

 

[Joe Richards [MVP]]

I haven't worked with this but I don't think it is possible. From what I
understand the default quota's are based on file owners which are going to be
individual users by default (administrators group for anyone in the admin
group). You can poke around in the MSDN docs though.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...leio/base/managing_disk_quotas.asp?frame=true

 

[Larry S]

OK. But underlying groups and users is and SID (security identifier).
Isn't everything really exspressed as an SID internally. I really think
there is a way to do this either through user tools or through some fairly
basic programming. Otherwise how did Northern accomplish it? At the worst
it would have to be implemented as and event driven sink on tje disk or
folder. I hope not though.

 

[Joe Richards [MVP]]

Northern most likely did it like the other Quota software companies most likely
did it. Wrote there own device drivers and maintained their own databases for
disk usage (allowed and real).

If it were very basic API manipulation, I would expect several
shareware/freeware versions to be running about at this point.

You could attempt to write to the quota API (they appear to have a WMI interface
) and write the SID for the group that you want to have a disk quota. Unless the
underlying implementation looks at all a user's groups and compares that to the
quota info, it won't do a whole lot.

Let me know how it works out.

joe

 

[Laura A. Robinson [MVP]]

circa Sat, 28 Aug 2004 22:20:24 GMT, in
microsoft.public.win2000.active_directory, Larry S ([email protected])
said,

OK. But underlying groups and users is and SID (security identifier).
Isn't everything really exspressed as an SID internally.

Not in the way you think it is; I think you may have a bit of
misconception of how ACLs and ownership are constructed.

I really think
there is a way to do this either through user tools or through some fairly
basic programming.

I really think there isn't.

Otherwise how did Northern accomplish it?

Through not-at-all-basic programming, as Joe mentioned to you. As you
may have guessed if you've seen http://www.joeware.net, Joe generally
knows whereof he speaks.

Laura

 

[Joe Richards [MVP]]

You make me blush Laura. )

 

[Larry S]

Looks like the 3rd party package and SDK will be they way to go for this.

Thanks for your input.