Re: Turning system accounting data into money
*snip* On 10/11/2011 4:23 PM, Christopher J. Ruwe wrote: Cannot be of any direct help, but ... You remember that 'astronomer chases hacker on Berkely computer systes'- novel, Cliff Stoll: The Cookoo's Egg? If not, try wikipedia. As an aside, I was told that at some universities' CS-classes, it is required lecture. In that novel, user's departments where charged according to resources spent on the university's computers and the main figure was tasked to find out about a 0.75$ accounting error and found a hacker instead. The system in the novel was a Berkeley Unix. So, systems that do what you want (and customers who want to pay on a per use basis) must be around for quite some time. The novel is copyrighted 1989, I cannot track when the real event circling around a certain Markus Hess, cf. also wikipedia, took place. My guess about the system is 4.3BSD Tahoe or earlier 4.3BSD. Cheers, I actually found that book not very long ago at a used book store. It was neat; I went in with my Wife, saw that, started reading the back, saw Berkeley, and bought it. At first I wasn't sure how it would go, but as I kept reading, I started knocking out like 5 chapters at a time, and reading multiple times a day. It was a REALLY good book, and, yea, the Copyright, on mine at least, says 1989 and 1990 but, in the book, he does name years in it. Some of them I know are 1987, and some I think were much earlier, but I don't think any of the time frames he gave were before 1985 or so, but I'd have to check, as I finished it and read the last chapter a while ago. I thought it was funny that a 75 cent accounting error was how they figured out a complete ring of chaos lol. And of course, you can't help but laugh at the VMS joke, and, the System V jokes. -Allen ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
RE: Turning system accounting data into money
Follow up --- I have just been told that the issue will be resolved over the weekend -- there apparently is some other issue being dealt with first. I should have the 44 files in the inbucket on Monday. -- Murray Taylor Bytecraft Systems Special Projects Engineer P: +61 3 8710 0600 D: +61 3 9238 5168 F: +61 3 9238 5140 |_|0|_|Absence of evidence |_|_|0|is not evidence of absence |0|0|0|Carl Sagan -Original Message- From: owner-freebsd-questi...@freebsd.org [mailto:owner-freebsd-questi...@freebsd.org] On Behalf Of Nikos Vassiliadis Sent: Wednesday, 12 October 2011 7:15 AM To: Polytropon Cc: FreeBSD Questions Subject: Re: Turning system accounting data into money On 10/11/2011 5:06 PM, Polytropon wrote: This is _not_ a spam message trying to sell something stupid to the list. I'm just searching for a solution to turn consumed computing resources into a number and a currency symbol. :-) Reason: A growing amount of (my) customers seems to like this concept: They speed a low fee for access to systems and applications, and they want to pay according to what they did with that system. The access fee covers access and some basic services (backup quota), and for anything more advanced they want to be charged per units used, or per consumed resources. This can be dialog time (SSH), disk I/O, disk occupied, pages printed (can happen) or pages required to print on exceptional specific forms (can happen once or twice a year and is charged with an additional fee for fold, staple mutilate). Sounds stupid? I have _real_ customers intendedly requesting that payment model (instead of just pay amount n Euro a month and do whatever you like). Accidentally, I remembered history. So I thought: This funcitonality has been present on UNIX systems for many decades. But _how_ to use it? I know there's the command set for accounting, for example the ac command. But what does its output total 7264.15 mean? There also are acct (process accounting), sa (for system accounting) and pac (for printer accounting, just dooesn't seem to work with CUPS). I'd also like to use the /etc/csh.logout resp. ~/.logout mechanism. When a user logs in, he will be presented the program he uses (or a menu, in case he uses different ones). This can also be a regular remote desktop session. When he logs out, a message should be displayed that informs him how much will be charged for the session. At the end of the month, he should get an invoice with the proper accumulated amount. For example, if a user wishes to issue a make a backup _now_, because I intendedly want _this_ current state backed up _now_, this will be seen as additional I/O load and disk occupation (because it's handled aside of the regular backup runs that should be part of the basic package charged with the conneciton fee). Or as I said, he issues printing for stuff he cannot print at home, so he will be charged for 500 pages. And in case he transfers 10 GB data in, and 10 GB data out, he will be charged for that traffic, as well as for the I/O. The sessions in questions will be SSH sessions (text mode) as well as SSH/X sessions (remote desktops). Maybe someone already uses something similar he wants to share? Suggestions and inspirations are welcome. Yes, the builtin accounting facilities do most of the stuff you are interested in. Just add 'accounting_enable=YES' in your /etc/rc.conf, run '/etc/rc.d/accounting start' and use sa to examine the output. I believe the per-user accounting will fit the bill nicely. You did not mention jails, right? The networking part perhaps can be a firewall's job, though I don't know if the per-user IP traffic rules work properly. There were some problems regarding this ages ago... The builtin printing stuff I believe is for use with the ancient printing tools and I know nothing about CUPS... Hey, these are pretty old stuff you are looking for or perhaps this email was stuck in the mail server's queue for 25 years;) HTH, Nikos ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org --- The information transmitted in this e-mail is for the exclusive use of the intended addressee and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, re-transmission, dissemination or other use of it, or the taking of any action in reliance upon this information by persons and/or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you received this in error, please inform the sender and/or addressee immediately and delete the material. E-mails may not be secure, may contain computer viruses and may be corrupted in transmission. Please carefully check this e-mail (and any attachment) accordingly. No warranties
Re: Turning system accounting data into money
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Christopher J. Ruwe c...@cruwe.de wrote: So, systems that do what you want (and customers who want to pay on a per use basis) must be around for quite some time. Yeah, this was the normal way of doing things for many years on large systems, back when a large system was a multiuser UNIX box the size of a refrigerator. For a long time it went away, as computer time got too cheap to meter, so a lot of the accounting tools that exist in UNIX are a bit foreign to modern admins. We're seeing a bit of a resurgence of the pay-for-usage model with services like Amazon EC2. ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Turning system accounting data into money
On 10/11/2011 5:06 PM, Polytropon wrote: This is _not_ a spam message trying to sell something stupid to the list. I'm just searching for a solution to turn consumed computing resources into a number and a currency symbol. :-) Reason: A growing amount of (my) customers seems to like this concept: They speed a low fee for access to systems and applications, and they want to pay according to what they did with that system. The access fee covers access and some basic services (backup quota), and for anything more advanced they want to be charged per units used, or per consumed resources. This can be dialog time (SSH), disk I/O, disk occupied, pages printed (can happen) or pages required to print on exceptional specific forms (can happen once or twice a year and is charged with an additional fee for fold, staple mutilate). Sounds stupid? I have _real_ customers intendedly requesting that payment model (instead of just pay amount n Euro a month and do whatever you like). Accidentally, I remembered history. So I thought: This funcitonality has been present on UNIX systems for many decades. But _how_ to use it? I know there's the command set for accounting, for example the ac command. But what does its output total 7264.15 mean? There also are acct (process accounting), sa (for system accounting) and pac (for printer accounting, just dooesn't seem to work with CUPS). I'd also like to use the /etc/csh.logout resp. ~/.logout mechanism. When a user logs in, he will be presented the program he uses (or a menu, in case he uses different ones). This can also be a regular remote desktop session. When he logs out, a message should be displayed that informs him how much will be charged for the session. At the end of the month, he should get an invoice with the proper accumulated amount. For example, if a user wishes to issue a make a backup _now_, because I intendedly want _this_ current state backed up _now_, this will be seen as additional I/O load and disk occupation (because it's handled aside of the regular backup runs that should be part of the basic package charged with the conneciton fee). Or as I said, he issues printing for stuff he cannot print at home, so he will be charged for 500 pages. And in case he transfers 10 GB data in, and 10 GB data out, he will be charged for that traffic, as well as for the I/O. The sessions in questions will be SSH sessions (text mode) as well as SSH/X sessions (remote desktops). Maybe someone already uses something similar he wants to share? Suggestions and inspirations are welcome. Yes, the builtin accounting facilities do most of the stuff you are interested in. Just add 'accounting_enable=YES' in your /etc/rc.conf, run '/etc/rc.d/accounting start' and use sa to examine the output. I believe the per-user accounting will fit the bill nicely. You did not mention jails, right? The networking part perhaps can be a firewall's job, though I don't know if the per-user IP traffic rules work properly. There were some problems regarding this ages ago... The builtin printing stuff I believe is for use with the ancient printing tools and I know nothing about CUPS... Hey, these are pretty old stuff you are looking for or perhaps this email was stuck in the mail server's queue for 25 years;) HTH, Nikos ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Turning system accounting data into money
On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 23:14:44 +0300, Nikos Vassiliadis wrote: Yes, the builtin accounting facilities do most of the stuff you are interested in. Just add 'accounting_enable=YES' in your /etc/rc.conf, run '/etc/rc.d/accounting start' and use sa to examine the output. I believe the per-user accounting will fit the bill nicely. You did not mention jails, right? Not at the moment. If required, I'd have to do that within the particular jail (and hope values are still correct). The networking part perhaps can be a firewall's job, though I don't know if the per-user IP traffic rules work properly. There were some problems regarding this ages ago... Per-user can be assumed as per-known-IP, as most users will call from the same IP (or at least IP range). A different approach could be to give specific connection ports to the customers individually, so instead of :22 for SSH, :22001 for customer 1, :22002 for customer2 and so on, so this could be accounted by traffic accumulation based on port. The builtin printing stuff I believe is for use with the ancient printing tools [...] The _standard_ printing tools. :-) [...] and I know nothing about CUPS... I won't let _that_ on my application server. So for the rare printing jobs, I think I may be better of with manually counting the pages. Hey, these are pretty old stuff you are looking for or perhaps this email was stuck in the mail server's queue for 25 years;) Think more broader, and think again, and you'll find many old-fashioned things that became modern again. The accounting model from mainframe times: the Cloud, rent a software, rent infrastructures, guided dialogs and so on -- nothing new per se. It's just that some customers re-explore those things and the payment models related to them. And as it's my only wish to please the good customer... well, he's the king, and I... I'm just, erm... Help! Help! I'm being oppressed!!! :-) -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Turning system accounting data into money
On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:06:19 +0200 Polytropon free...@edvax.de wrote: This is _not_ a spam message trying to sell something stupid to the list. I'm just searching for a solution to turn consumed computing resources into a number and a currency symbol. :-) Reason: A growing amount of (my) customers seems to like this concept: They speed a low fee for access to systems and applications, and they want to pay according to what they did with that system. The access fee covers access and some basic services (backup quota), and for anything more advanced they want to be charged per units used, or per consumed resources. This can be dialog time (SSH), disk I/O, disk occupied, pages printed (can happen) or pages required to print on exceptional specific forms (can happen once or twice a year and is charged with an additional fee for fold, staple mutilate). Sounds stupid? I have _real_ customers intendedly requesting that payment model (instead of just pay amount n Euro a month and do whatever you like). Accidentally, I remembered history. So I thought: This funcitonality has been present on UNIX systems for many decades. But _how_ to use it? I know there's the command set for accounting, for example the ac command. But what does its output total 7264.15 mean? There also are acct (process accounting), sa (for system accounting) and pac (for printer accounting, just dooesn't seem to work with CUPS). I'd also like to use the /etc/csh.logout resp. ~/.logout mechanism. When a user logs in, he will be presented the program he uses (or a menu, in case he uses different ones). This can also be a regular remote desktop session. When he logs out, a message should be displayed that informs him how much will be charged for the session. At the end of the month, he should get an invoice with the proper accumulated amount. For example, if a user wishes to issue a make a backup _now_, because I intendedly want _this_ current state backed up _now_, this will be seen as additional I/O load and disk occupation (because it's handled aside of the regular backup runs that should be part of the basic package charged with the conneciton fee). Or as I said, he issues printing for stuff he cannot print at home, so he will be charged for 500 pages. And in case he transfers 10 GB data in, and 10 GB data out, he will be charged for that traffic, as well as for the I/O. The sessions in questions will be SSH sessions (text mode) as well as SSH/X sessions (remote desktops). Maybe someone already uses something similar he wants to share? Suggestions and inspirations are welcome. Cannot be of any direct help, but ... You remember that 'astronomer chases hacker on Berkely computer systes'- novel, Cliff Stoll: The Cookoo's Egg? If not, try wikipedia. As an aside, I was told that at some universities' CS-classes, it is required lecture. In that novel, user's departments where charged according to resources spent on the university's computers and the main figure was tasked to find out about a 0.75$ accounting error and found a hacker instead. The system in the novel was a Berkeley Unix. So, systems that do what you want (and customers who want to pay on a per use basis) must be around for quite some time. The novel is copyrighted 1989, I cannot track when the real event circling around a certain Markus Hess, cf. also wikipedia, took place. My guess about the system is 4.3BSD Tahoe or earlier 4.3BSD. Cheers, -- Christopher J. Ruwe TZ GMT + 2 ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
Re: Turning system accounting data into money
Ever heard of bold_or_underline? On Oct 11, 2011 10:06 AM, Polytropon free...@edvax.de wrote: This is _not_ a spam message trying to sell something stupid to the list. I'm just searching for a solution to turn consumed computing resources into a number and a currency symbol. :-) Reason: A growing amount of (my) customers seems to like this concept: They speed a low fee for access to systems and applications, and they want to pay according to what they did with that system. The access fee covers access and some basic services (backup quota), and for anything more advanced they want to be charged per units used, or per consumed resources. This can be dialog time (SSH), disk I/O, disk occupied, pages printed (can happen) or pages required to print on exceptional specific forms (can happen once or twice a year and is charged with an additional fee for fold, staple mutilate). Sounds stupid? I have _real_ customers intendedly requesting that payment model (instead of just pay amount n Euro a month and do whatever you like). Accidentally, I remembered history. So I thought: This funcitonality has been present on UNIX systems for many decades. But _how_ to use it? I know there's the command set for accounting, for example the ac command. But what does its output total 7264.15 mean? There also are acct (process accounting), sa (for system accounting) and pac (for printer accounting, just dooesn't seem to work with CUPS). I'd also like to use the /etc/csh.logout resp. ~/.logout mechanism. When a user logs in, he will be presented the program he uses (or a menu, in case he uses different ones). This can also be a regular remote desktop session. When he logs out, a message should be displayed that informs him how much will be charged for the session. At the end of the month, he should get an invoice with the proper accumulated amount. For example, if a user wishes to issue a make a backup _now_, because I intendedly want _this_ current state backed up _now_, this will be seen as additional I/O load and disk occupation (because it's handled aside of the regular backup runs that should be part of the basic package charged with the conneciton fee). Or as I said, he issues printing for stuff he cannot print at home, so he will be charged for 500 pages. And in case he transfers 10 GB data in, and 10 GB data out, he will be charged for that traffic, as well as for the I/O. The sessions in questions will be SSH sessions (text mode) as well as SSH/X sessions (remote desktops). Maybe someone already uses something similar he wants to share? Suggestions and inspirations are welcome. -- Polytropon Magdeburg, Germany Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0 Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ... ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org ___ freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org
