cotner@brahms.berkeley.edu (Carl Cotner) (11/29/88)
I would like to implement a more detailed accounting system than what UNIX offers. Specifically, on the SUNs around here, I'd like a program which prompts the user for a Job Number when he logs in. Depending on what task he'll be performing, he should supply an appropriate Job Number. This JN is then recorded into a local accounting file for further record-keeping. I've seen this implemented before elsewhere; but on that machine, the operators bought UNIX source, so they were able to patch 'login' to query for the JN and record it. Now I'm dealing with SUNs in which the UNIX OS came distributed in binary only, no source. I don't know where to begin to implement this. Does anyone done this before? Carl cotner@brahms.Berkeley.EDU ucbvax!brahms!cotner Carl Cotner/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720
gandalf@csli.STANFORD.EDU (Juergen Wagner) (11/29/88)
In general, what keeps the user from supplying a job number indicating he/she is going to work on project XYZ but then playing rogue? In particular, what do you want to use the accounting for? If it is just a hint on user account usage, I suggest to setup a daemon which listens on a AF_UNIX socket, and every user should have something like echo -n "Gimme your job number? joblogger $< and the program 'joblogger' will then record whatever info you need, this may be used to change the job number in the middle of a login session (no problem because the joblogger process may fetch the usage statistics of its parent). If that's not what you need, short of patching login, how about a job number suffix to user names. You may even have different passwords then. It will be a different problem to ensure that the job numbers provided by users are accurate. -- Juergen Wagner gandalf@csli.stanford.edu wagner@arisia.xerox.com