Tutorials 
Setting Up Disk Quotas In Mac OS X Using the GUI
By Kevin Michael
I am a tech at Park Hall, Ithaca College where we have about 40 Apple
Final Cut Pro editing stations, and having to move up to Mac OS X I needed a
way to set up password protected accounts, about eight, for each
machine. Each Mac has five hard drives, one is the boot/apps drive and
four of them are for the clients/students video. In OS9 we used OnGuard
to do password protect the accounts, yet as of this time there is no
OnGuard for Mac OS X and I like this way better, because it sets a quota for
each client, in our case of 20 gig.
We have multiple people/clients using the same machine at different
times and we want each account protected by a password and we want the
client to have a disk quota and, of course, I did not want to learn Unix
Command Line, learn it you are better off, it takes some time yet it is
extremely powerful and there are plenty of resources on the web and lots
of books, besides it becomes a lifelong hobby...that said,
THIS PROCESS WILL ERASE THE HARD DRIVE IN QUESTION
First partition the hard drive you want to give a quota to to the amount
of the quota...ie I have a 60 gig hardrive and I want to give 20 gig to
each of three clients so I divide by 3 and set the partitions up to 20
gig using Disk Utility, which is in the Utilities folder/directory in
the Applications folder/directory. Suppose I want uneven partitions for
different clients, like Larry gets 10 gig and Mary and Barry get 25 gig?
This is easy to do in Disk Utilities by using the grip in between the
partitions in Disk Utility.
Setting up accounts in mac OS 10.2.2
One thing that needs to be said is that if you as the admin decide that
admin account will not have permissions to the clients partitions, then
the only way to get access to these partitions is through the root user
and you have to enable the root user in OSX, otherwise give admin the
permissions you as admin will need if you do not want to enable the root
account. i use the root account. Why, because i want the accounts locked
up solid so i do not give admin's read/write/execute permissions
1) - setup a user account and password with admin permissions. You will need admin permissions to move the Home folder directory to the partition that the new user will be assigned
2) - log out then log back in as new user
3) - go to Users folder/directory on boot hard drive
4) - copy user's Home folder to whatever partition you want to protect "drag and drop works here"
5) - open Netinfo click in users folder/directory
6) - click on the new user you just created
7) - click on the "click lock to make changes button" lower left hand corner
8) - type in password in dialogue box, the password will be the one you gave to the new account.
9) - scroll down to home and double click on /Users/username
10) - change /Users/username to /Volumes/partitionname/username
11) - save changes
12) - log out then log back in as username
13) - create a file using an app, textedit perhaps, and save it making sure that the path is partionname/username/documents
14) - log out then back in again as root or admin
15) - remove admin priveleges to the new account
16) - click once on partition
17) - Get Info of partition
18) - Click on Ownership & Permissions
19) - Click on the lock button
20) - Set the Owner to the username of the new account
21) - Set Access to read & write
22) - Set the Group and Others to whatever permissions you want to give them...I set access to "No Access" for groups and others, you might want to give admin or a group read permissions or not....your call.
Kevin Michael
Multimedia Support Tech
Park Hall, Ithaca College
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