Removing the filesystem quota on a partition

I want to install Dovecot on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, and it recommends that we place the control files into a partition which will not be limited by the filesystem quota.

If I create an ext4 partition with 2 gigs, how do I remove the quota on that partition? I know the partitions are defined in /etc/fstab, and I think usrquota and grpquota have to be explicitly set to disabled.

But I am unsure what the entire line should look like.

Is it something like:

/dev/hda2 / ext4 defaults,usrquota,grpquota 1 0 0

On the other hand, I found something called quotaon and quotaoff. Would this be used instead of fstab? Is there a difference?

2 Answers

Your mount points are defined in /etc/fstab and those options will be used by default every time you boot.

So if you use the line:

 /dev/hda2 / ext4 defaults,usrquota,grpquota 1 0 0

quotas will be enabled when you boot.

The commands quotaon and quotaoff will enable / disable quotas from the command line.

See: for additional options.

So if you wish to disable quotas by default, use noquota in fstab

/dev/hda2 / ext4 defaults,noquota 1 0 0

Quotas are off by default, and must be explicitly enabled by building quota files with quotacheck, and placing the quota flags in /etc/fstab for quotaon -a to recognize and activate the quotas during boot.

So unless you did all that, you don't have to do a thing.

If you did, then you can turn them off with quotaoff and removing the flags from /etc/fstab to prevent them from being turned back on at the next boot.