Before attempting to use disk quotas it is necessary to make sure that quotas are configured in your kernel. This is done by adding the following line to your kernel configuration file:
options QUOTAThe stock GENERIC kernel does not have this enabled by default, so you will have to configure, build and install a custom kernel in order to use disk quotas. Please refer to the Configuring the FreeBSD Kernel section for more information on kernel configuration.
Next you will need to enable disk quotas in /etc/sysconfig.
This is done by changing the line:
quotas=NOto:
quotas=YES
If you are running FreeBSD 2.2.2 or later, the configuration file
will be /etc/rc.conf instead and the variable name changed to
check_quotas=YES
Finally you will need to edit /etc/fstab to enable
disk quotas on a per-file system basis. This is where you can
either enable user or group quotas or both for all of your file
systems.
To enable per-user quotas on a file system, add the
userquota option to the options field in the
/etc/fstab entry for the file system you want to
to enable quotas on. For example:
/dev/sd1s2g /home ufs rw,userquota 1 2
Similarly, to enable group quotas, use the groupquota
option instead of the userquota keyword. To enable both
user and group quotas, change the entry as follows:
/dev/sd1s2g /home ufs rw,userquota,groupquota 1 2
By default the quota files are stored in the root directory of the file
system with the names quota.user and quota.group
for user and group quotas respectively. See man fstab for more
information. Even though that man page says that you can specify an
alternate location for the quota files, this is not recommended since
all of the various quota utilities do not seem to handle this
properly.
At this point you should reboot your system with your new kernel.
/etc/rc will automatically run the appropriate commands to
create the initial quota files for all of the quotas you enabled
in /etc/fstab, so there is no need to manually create any
zero length quota files.
In the normal course of operations you should not be required
to run the quotacheck, quotaon, or quotaoff
commands manually. However, you may want to read their man pages
just to be familiar with their operation.