policies and hard drive quotas

[tlarkin]

Anyone use quotas? I only ask this because we are about to deploy 5,500 Macbook Airs with 60gig SSD drives in them. I guarantee my users will fill it with pictures, music and movies really fast. So I am thinking at some point I may need to push a package and have no HD space on the client to do so. My first though is to preflight package installs with scripts that read the free space on a hard drive and if below a certain percentage notify user via Growl (oh yeah I put growl in my image) that they must delete some stuff off their HD to get updates.

Any ideas, or anyone currently doing this? I am also thinking about having a scheduled task that checks once a week and notifies users via growl if they are below 10% free space on their SSD.

Thanks,

Tom

[bentoms]

I'm sure you could create a smart group based on less than 10% space available or 90% or more space used.

Then have policy with a daily execution frequency that then nags the user via growl or even jamfHelper.

Regards,

Ben.

[tlarkin]

Hmm, if I did this I would cache it and make it available off line because I don't want too many policies hitting my JSS with a high frequency because we have just added 5,500 clients to our infrastructure. Not too sure how my server will handle that and cannot tell until school starts.

Good idea though, and I will definitely test it out. I think that if I do that and cache it out and make it available off line it could work and it would run locally instead off the JSS.

Thanks,

Tom

[rockpapergoat]

i'd probably warn sooner than at 90% full and lock out the user or something. in your experience, will a growl notification be enough to have someone take action? there's nothing preventing anyone from ignoring those and filling the ssd. i'd test quotas as well.

[tlarkin]

I just am now deploying Growl for the first time. I did see in the command line binary for growl you can set the size, the corner it displays in and if the user can close it or not.

I am not sure if OS X Client supports disk quotas, you have to set those on the hardware level. In OS X Server you have to enable them on the hard drive first, then set them with the command line binary or Open Directory. Then enable the quotas on the share itself.

I could maybe enforce a soft quota on the /Users folder and say make it cap at like 35gigs that way the image can take up 10, and leaves me 5 gigs of free space. I wonder what is going to happen to students that need CS4.... This will be an interesting year.

Thanks, Tom

[rockpapergoat]

also figure enough room for swap. if the machines ship with low RAM, they're going to swap easily at some point. if you set your hard limit at 5 gb free, and the vm swap files jump to 3 gb or higher during a particularly hungry operation, then you're in a tight spot.

in a quick scan of the growlnotify help, i don't see anywhere to define size. and any time i've used it, the notifications are easily dismissed.

you might want to try lockscreen, jamfHelper's similar functionality, or BigHonkingText (http://www.macenterprise.org/articles/automatorandappleremotedesktop) instead.

either way, it's time to test this stuff. you don't want to roll these out the door only to get flooded with "i can't save my files" tickets.

[bentoms]

How about a du -hs on the users folder that if over a certain size triggers a notification?

Regards,

Ben.

[tlarkin]

testing time won't happen until roll out. I am currently unboxing, asset tagging, and imaging 5,500 laptops. No time for testing just yet. Unless, I over achieve and take my work home..... :-)

Maybe I am confusing myself with the GUI part of growl, but I swore I saw something that allowed for you to set the location, size, and time it would notify the user

-tom

[stevewood]

I don't believe there is a way to interact directly with Growl, without
On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 6:24 PM, Thomas Larkin <tlarki at kckps.org> wrote:
using growlnotify. With growlnotify it doesn't appear that you can set the
size or the location. I believe location is based on what the user has set
in the preference pane.

You can set the title, icon, name of the window, the "stickiness" of the
window, and of course the message. The extras page for Growl lists the
switches for growlnotify: http://growl.info/extras.php

Here's a link to the man page:

http://sage.ucsc.edu/Library/init/zsh/man/html/growlnotify.html

Steve Wood
Director of IT
swood at integer.com

The Integer Group | 1999 Bryan St. | Ste. 1700 | Dallas, TX 75201
T 214.758.6813 | F 214.758.6901 | C 940.312.2475

[jarednichols]

What you can do is use GrowlNotify and register it as a separate "application." This way you can assign that application a customized appearance theme ("smoke" etc.). Some of these are customizable a bit or you can even make your own. Some are "sticky-able" in which case the user actually has to click on the growl popup to dismiss it. Depending on how you craft your notifications, that "sticky" can actually hang the process of your script. Once they dismiss it, the script continues.

j
---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[tlarkin]

There is a mode in growl notify called music video, which takes up the bottom quarter of the screen almost. I also know a bit of apple script and can use osascript to display dialogs. I can also code user interaction, but reading output from AS is a bit tricky back into bash, but not impossible.

-Tom

[taugust04]

FYI, Growl will no longer be free going forward, if my interpretation of this article is correct:

http://www.tuaw.com/2011/07/08/interview-growls-project-lead-on-coming-to-the-mac-app-store/

Not sure if this factors into your decision to use Growl on 5500 Macs. I'm no longer including it on my images due to this announcement.

-- Ted August
Salve Regina University

[stevewood]

Well now that just bites! Wonder if they will be doing site licenses?
On Fri, Aug 5, 2011 at 10:48 AM, Ted August <taugust04.lists at gmail.com>wrote:

Or better yet, I wonder if JAMF will take advantage of the developer bits
that he mentioned in his interview? Or perhaps someone else will write an
alternative app.

Steve Wood
Director of IT
swood at integer.com

The Integer Group | 1999 Bryan St. | Ste. 1700 | Dallas, TX 75201
T 214.758.6813 | F 214.758.6901 | C 940.312.2475

[tlarkin]

I'll just build my own message system then with apple script, no way I am paying for Growl....good luck to the developer though, hope they get something out of it

[bentoms]

Jamf helper has been quite matured.

Might be worth another look?

Regards,

Ben.