Block Limit Reached for UD Sun Ray Terminals

The disk file system with all your Unix files is constrained by a quota system. When your block limit is reached, you are over quota. Usually, you will get an error message such as write: Disc quota exceeded when a application attempts to write beyond the quota limit, and you will get the message block limit reached every time you log in to the system. Unfortunately, these messages are often lost and not displayed when using the Java Desktop System.

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Login in a Failsafe Session

If your block limit is reached, you will not be able to log in to the Sun Ray terminals using the Java Desktop System. But you can log in using the Failsafe Session option.

logon in failsafe mode

You should see one terminal window in the upper-left corner of the screen with a prompt on the Sun Ray server that was shown in your welcome message.

Block limit reached on /home/usra 
Sun Microsystems Inc. SunOS 5.10 Generic January 2005 
vivaldi.udel.edu% _

If you see the message Block limit reached, you need to delete some files to get you under your quota limit. Even if you do not see the error message, you may still be close to being over quota.

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Checking quota limits

Check your quota limits with the quota -v command:

vivaldi.udel.edu% quota -v 
Disk quotas for traine (uid 19646): 
Filesystem     usage  quota  limit timeleft files quota limit timeleft 
/home/usra    102396 102400 102400           1138 76800 76800

In this last case, the usage is just 4K less than the limit. The block size is 4K, so this means the last file written to your account is probably incomplete. Incomplete files will cause erratic behavior with Java Desktop system and cause problems with packages such as Matlab or Eclipse.

If the incomplete file is the .Xauthority file, you cannot log in using the Sun Rays in the Java Desktop System, but you still can log in using the Failsafe Session option.

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Listing all files sorted by size

Use the command

du -ak | sort -n

Here are the last 10 lines of the complete list from a Failsafe Session window.

1256         ./.matlab 
1476         ./.staroffice7/user 
1708         ./.mozilla/firefox/cwqlyqss.default/XPC.mfasl
2748         ./.staroffice7 
4464         ./.mozilla/firefox/cwqlyqss.default/urlclassifier2.sqlite
8248         ./.mozilla/firefox/cwqlyqss.default
8264         ./.mozilla/firefox 8268 ./.mozilla
85616        ./download.zip 
103792       .

Each line in the list contains a directory or file. The very last (largest) number is the disk usage for your home directory (.). In the above case, there is one file in the home directory named "download.zip," which accounts for more than 85% of the total usage. Remove this file and your usage will be well under your quota limit.

rm ./download.zip

Continuing to look at smaller files, you see hidden directories, which begin with a dot. These are where preference files and history lists are kept. History lists can get large over time as you use a package repeatedly, and should be checked periodically.

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Special directories

Special directories to look for in the sorted list shown above:

.mozilla Hidden directory with browser files including Firefox.
.staroffice7 Hidden directory with StarOffice files.
.matlab Hidden directory with Matlab files including all older versions.
.eclipse Hidden directory with Eclipse files including all older versions.
.sunstudio Hidden directory with Sun Studio files including user information.

In these directories, the actual file will appear above the name of the directory containing the file.

You can remove these special directories, and the next time you run the corresponding application, you will be treated as a new user. The directories will be rebuilt to the default settings, and you will lose any customization you may have done.

For example, to remove the browser preferences including bookmarks, history lists, and cache, type the recursive remove command:

\rm -r .mozilla

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Special files

There are special files which are good candidates for removal:

*.ps    Postscript files used for printing
*.pdf   Documentation file in Adobe PDF format, a common download format
a.out  Executable file generated by a command-line compile command
core   Debugging file generated after a program crashes

You can use the

find

command to find these special files anywhere in your directory structure:

vivaldi.udel.edu% find . -name '*.ps'
./Documents/out.ps 
./Documents/plot.ps
./Documents/fig.ps 
vivaldi.udel.edu% find . -name '*.pdf' 
./SunRay_atHome033105.pdf
./Documents/print.pdf
vivaldi.udel.edu% find . -name 'a.out' 
vivaldi.udel.edu% find . -name 'core'
In this case, three postscript files and one PDF file were found in the Documents directory. The Documents directory contains the files in the Documents folder on your Desktop. You can remove them using the standard UNIX rm command, or you can remove them from the Java Desktop by moving them to your trash. Remember, you must delete them from trash to reduce your disk usage. See GNOME Trash.

Note: The core file is only useful for debugging programs you have written and is normally a waste of your disk space. It can be very large. You should set your default shell to limit the core dump size to 0 to avoid being put over quota every time programs like Matlab crash.

For csh or tcsh (should be in your .cshrc file)

limit coredumpsize 0

For sh or bash (should be in your .profile or .bash_profile file.)

ulimit -c 0

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Request an increase in quota limits

Request an increase in your quota limit after you have investigated the likely cause of your disk quota problem. For more help see How to Manage Your Disk Quota.

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