Benjamin J Doherty wrote: > 1. Am I reinventing the wheel? > 2. All this focus on the client machines... could server logs be > holding that data already? (Probably not for individual client > applications!)
Login and logout records are usually on servers - even Windows servers. Individual client apps could be tracked from the client by rerouting shortcuts to files which send a message to the server about what they are running, but that's a bit of a stretch. That stuff may simply be easier to get from a client machine, though I don't think that Windows tracks such things at a client level. Of course, you could have apps run from a server - and the server knows who asked for what and when. All that the client has to do is execute the file that the server has stored on it. The server notes who accessed it. > 3. And the big one... how on earth do I figure out how to do this? Better living through reckless experimentation? :-) > 4. Considering that this whole problem is contingent on a particular > set of free/open source software that already demands a good amount of > customization and tuning, how could lessons and products derived from > solving this problem be shared and exploited in other CTCs? How could > good design make this universal, extensible, and modular? Well, this could be the start of some empirical data on how such things can be solved. I'm not a big fan of systems that track what I do, and I'm not sure that such tracking is worth the overhead. However, that's a biased opinion. I typically leave users alone unless they do naughty things. > > Anything else? Thanks for reading! I think the real challenge is the tracking. Heterogenous networks work just fine - it's tracking everything that you want to track that is the real problem, and if it weren't for Windows, well, you would have it made because you could give the server root access on each of the clients and get the data you want. On Windows, I think you'd need to get into the task manager and track UIDs of threads, which is a nasty business by itself because many applications that are multithreaded under Windows do weird things when it comes to that stuff. It can be done, but the dependability might be suspect and would have to be tested. -- Taran Rampersad Presently in: San Fernando, Trinidad [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.knowprose.com http://www.easylum.net http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/Taran Coming on January 1st, 2006: http://www.OpenDepth.com "Criticize by creating." — Michelangelo _______________________________________________ DIGITALDIVIDE mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.edc.org/mailman/listinfo/digitaldivide To unsubscribe, send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word UNSUBSCRIBE in the body of the message.
