After reading through the documentation, the newsgroups, and the resource kit, I'm still a little confused on how to implement the following solution: we'd like to impose a quota on all MySites that are created, but we don't want to impose quotas on the WSS sites that will reside within the portal. We also want to have the ability to apply a different quota to a MySite based on request (like all employees can have a 5MB MySite, but if a manager requests it, they can be bumped up to a 10 or 15MB quota for their site and some managers won't even have quotas).

From the resource kit and the newsgroups, I think you can only set quotas for all sites at a virtual server level, not for all mysites.

We are also using shared services as we have a "top-level" portal and additional portals that will act as children within the top portal to consolodate my sites, & search.

It seems to me that what we probably want to do is create another portal and specify we want that portal to host all my sites. Then apply the quota to that virtual server's settings (because the only thing we'd use that portal for is my sites). However, when doing this, would the "Up To" link in the my site point to that new portal that holds just mysites or would it point to the top level shared services portal?