Programming FSRM quotas

Introduction

Recently I was evaluating the options I had for implementing disk quotas on a backend system running on a major Internet Service Provider in Brazil.

Windows offers quota management up to some degree since NTFS 5 (Windows 2000) with user/volume quotas. Those were not appropriate for our scenario since we needed to set quotas on a per directory basis and this was not supported natively by Windows until the arrival of Windows Server 2003 R2.

R2 brings us a new feature called File Server Resource Manager a.k.a. FSRM. It is exposed for the system administrator as an MMC 3.0 snap-in.

Unfortunately, as of today Microsoft does not officially support any way for programming against FSRM quotas.  I said “officially support” because if the snap-in can do it, probably we can too! So after some research I found two DLLs called srm.dll and srmlib.dll that happens to do the stuff we want. Srm.dll exposes FSRM functionality through COM and srmlib.dll is a managed code wrapper around srm.dll.

Let’s take a look at some sample code:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.Text;

using Microsoft.Storage;

using System.IO;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

 

namespace Fsrm {

    class Program {

        static void Main(string[] args) {

            string directoryName = @"c:FsrmTests";

 

            // Creates a directory for testing if necessary

            if (!Directory.Exists(directoryName)) {

                Directory.CreateDirectory(directoryName);

            }

           

            ISrmQuotaManager quotaManager = new SrmQuotaManagerClass();

            ISrmQuota quota = null;

            try {

                // Try to get quota info

                quota = quotaManager.GetQuota(directoryName);

                quota.QuotaLimit *= 2;

            }

            catch (COMException ex) {

                unchecked {

                    if (ex.ErrorCode == (int)0x80045301) {

                        // Quota doesn’t exist for this directory. Create it.

                        Console.WriteLine("No quota defined for ‘{0}’. Creating quota.", directoryName);

                        quota = quotaManager.CreateQuota(directoryName);

                        quota.QuotaLimit = 1024 * 1024;

                    }

                    else {

                        Console.WriteLine(ex);

                        return;

                    }

                }

            }

 

            // Update quota info

            quota.Commit();

 

            // Add new file to the diretory to see QuotaUsed getting updated

            File.WriteAllText(directoryName + @"" + Path.GetRandomFileName() + ".txt", "Testing FSRM directory quotas");

            Console.WriteLine("New file added. Quota doubledrn{0} of {1} used.", quota.QuotaUsed, quota.QuotaLimit);

        }

    }

}

 

This sample doubles the size of the directory’s quota and puts a file in it every time it is run.

There are a bunch of other classes and methods available. Have fun!

Published by

Alfred Myers

I have been interested in computers since I got my hands on a magazine about digital electronics back in 1983 and programming them has been paying the bills since 1991. Having focused on Microsoft-centric technology stacks for the best part of two decades, in recent years I’ve been educating myself on open source technologies such as Linux, networking and the open web platform.

4 thoughts on “Programming FSRM quotas”

  1. Nice post thanks! Now, is there a way to remotely manage quotas using your code? My goal is to build a web page for users to manage quotas on any file server we have. Is that possible using the API? Someway of declaring against wich server to run the code.

  2. Hi, I’m trying (as Tolga did) to remotely manage quotas on a fileserver from a .net application running on a separate server… do you know if it’s possible using the managed code assembly you used? thanks in advance for your help, Filippo

  3. Hi, I am trying to remotely manage quota on a fileserver from a .net application running on a separate server… please let me know pointer on this….thanks

  4. Pingback: FSRM Quota

Comments are closed.