more fun with hitting the hard quota

Hi,
So I've setup a couple of machines to test this in more detail.

The server is running rh's skipjack beta2. a 2.4.18 +a bunch of patches kernel.

ext3 filesystem, quotas turned on.
I set the user's hard quota to 200MB

if I mount it over nfs and then run:

while true
do
cat /dev/zero >> /mnt/test/dumbfile
done

Then the nfs server does respond with error messages about being over the quota and the current cat job will stop with this error:

cat: write error: Disk quota exceeded

But if I consistently make the request to write to that file (as in the above loop) the load on the server goes up to about 4 or 5.

At which point the other clients access becomes almost unbearable.

Does it make sense that one client should be able to abuse the server in this way? And why didn't this happen on 2.2.19? I had a lesser powered machine doing the same job and this problem never occurred.

I can provide more detailed tcpdumps from the server or client side now if that'd help more.

Thanks
-sv

GPG Public Key: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~skvidal/skvidal.gpg