I am needed to set a soft limit of 200MB and hard limit of 205MB for users.

How do I calculate that for a harddisk with ext2, ext3 and reiserfs ?

Correct me if i am wrong. For ext2 i need to determine the block size with the command

dumpe2fs /dev/hda1
from here i get the block size of 4096

therefore (200 x 1024) / 4096 = 50MB (50000) is the soft limit

therefore (205 x 1024) / 4096 = 51.25MB (51250) is the hard limit

Yes those are the correct number of blocks.

You might want to use the -h option on dumpe2fs or you might want to use the tune2fs -l /dev/whatever to see volume information.

5 MB does not seem to be a large enough number between the soft limit and the hard limit.

Then again I am totally against the use of disk quotas. They will only cause problems for you and the end users. You will find that someone has used up their disk quota and is working on some critical report. They need more space and they don't have the time to clean out their old files. This will create an emergency for you and you will just have to raise that person's disk quota anyway. If you don't then their manager, the CEO inevitably, will get very angry at you. If you do then they will never go back and clean up their old files anyway. Disk quotas are the kind of thing that looks good on paper but doesn't actually fly.

You must have experience all these nonsense haa ... well I'll see where i can implement it on, perhaps on less critical areas.

By the way, how about ext3 and reiserfs ? How do i go about to calculate it ?

I don't know if journaling file systems are supported with the disk quota utility. The man page for setquotactl says that the XFS file system has special parameters to invoke XQM, which is the quota utility for XFS. The XFS file system is the only one named and it is treated as a special case. That appears to imply to me that only ext2 and XFS are supported. I looked at the man pages for all of the disk quota utilities, edquota(8), quota(1), quotactl(2), quotacheck(8), quotaon(8), repquota(8), and this is all that I could find. All of them talk about a -F parameter for specifying the quota version but they only talk about old version and new version and XFS.

I have had problems with Reiser file system so I advise against using it. I have bad luck with XFS as well. I only trust ext2 and ext3 for Linux systems.

Im sorry, but I dont understand. I want to set a soft limit of 8 GB and hard limit of 10 GB for users.
According to your explanation I get this:
the block size of 4096

therefore (8 x 1024 x 1024) / 4096 = 2048 (2048000) is the soft limit????

therefore (10 x 1024 x 1024) / 4096 = 2560 (2560000) is the hard limit????

Is it that correct???
Why do I have to convert 2048 again to kb? I mean, I did it (8 x 1024 x 1024) here.

I will appreciate any answer.