13 January 2012, 5:38

Hi everyone.

I've got a Moodle instalation with a bit more than 10000 students. I would like very much to deploy a Mahara for all of them, but I've got a little problem: hard disk space.

All students have a quota on a huge storage system. And that is basically my problem. They have space on the storage, and I don't have the possibility to give them more space anywhere (for now).

So, how can I use that space as a Mahara Dataroot? Is it possible to use my /users/students/{user1, user2,...}/maharadata using at the same time the filesystems quota?

The way that I am thinking that would solve my problem is to put in each user home a maharadata directory. When authenticated, Mahara should use the space of that particular user only.

Does anyone had a similar problem? Is this aproach even possible?

(Sorry if this is the wrong forum to post)

15 January 2012, 15:26

Hi Rodolfo,

That's not possible without major changes to the way Mahara stores files - they're currently not stored by user id.  Even if we were to rewrite that to include the user id or username in the path somewhere, we'd still run into the problem of where to store files that aren't associated with a particular user (site files and files owned by groups).

16 January 2012, 5:33

Hi Richard,

thank you for your reply.

I would really want to put a Mahara into production here. But without quota support of some kind... We are talking about 5Gb~10Gb (at least) to 10.000 users... in a redundant, failover blah blah, (expensive!) system. Users have their own private space, where they have their mail, public_html et al.

Ok, and what about this:

-> put maharadata on a storage as it is supposed to.

-> mahara_quota_for_each_user = (filesystem_quota - mahara_size_of_files_of_user)

that leaves system and group files usage. But I think I can live with that...

Would that work?

Best regards.

16 January 2012, 15:37

You can set the default quotas in Mahara to be low enough so that you're unlikely to run out of space, but it'll be difficult to ensure that each user's total share of the disk (home directory plus Mahara files) remains fair over time.  You could try writing a script to regularly get the size of the home directories, find the corresponding Mahara users and update their quotas in the Mahara database, but it's probably not worth the hassle.

To stop group files from getting out of control, you should set a low group quota, but also restrict group creation to administrators and staff (you need to change a setting in the admin area for that).

22 January 2012, 17:33

Hi all,

At the Univeristy of Canberra we are trying to deal with the same storage issues.

At the moment students have files in Micosoft Live/Skydrive, other Uni Systems, maybe Dropbox, etc.

We would like to allocate a very small file area in Mahara and encourage users to use other providers for their files. Especially since we are looking at course long + alumni access. We need to let students pick files from their own spaces in the same way they can embed (their) videos with the Youtube plugin.

Our solution for Mahara storage is basically to try not to use Mahara for storage. The pedagogy and logic behind using e-portfolios is well documented and the number of use cases and evidence of positive impact is still growing. But honestly, storing the "stuff" in an affordable manner is the biggest bottleneck and needs to be worked out in order to achieve widespread and successful adoption IMHO.

Thanks for the discussion!