[CompSoc-News] New Scratch Space

[compsoc-news-admin at skynet.ie]

New Scratch System
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One of the things us admins managed to sort out during some downtime
yesterday was a simple scratch system. What I mean by this is a place
where you can put large temporary files, like CD images or the other
stuff you guys and gals always seem to be downloading. So we created a
new paritition called /scratch which is just under 10gigs in size. Each
user has a directory inside the scratch partition, just like you have a
directory in the /home partition. However, the make things even easier
there is a symlink (a directory) in your home directory called "scratch"
which links to your scratch directory.

Files on the scratch partition exist for at least 3 days, they are
deleted automatically by a script when they are more than three days
old. Stored whatever junk you want here and of whatever size, no one can
be punished for taking up to much scratch space, also not admins will
not help you out if you lose a file that was stored in scratch space of
if there is not enough space on the scratch to store what you need to.

It also follows that with this new system, stricter action will be taken
against quota abuse. The quota is 50Megs and any scratch stuff is not
counted in that.