kathy@gsg.UUCP (Kathryn Smith) (12/27/85)
This is primarily directed at the System Administrators out there. Our accounting department has recently decided that we should keep better track of what computer resources are being used on our consulting projects, rather than just keeping track of the man hours involved, and I'm trying to put together a package to do this. I am not using the standard Unix accounting reports for several reasons. We are running 4.2BSD on one machine, and System V on the other, but would like the reports to be compatible. Also, we have become aware of several small problems with the standard system accounting on the 4.2 system, which have been fixed, but we don't have source on the System V machine, and aren't sure we trust it. What I am doing at the moment is collecting the total connect time for each account over a period of a week, plus the average disk usage for each account, figured each week. Accounting can then determine what percentage of the total available time/space is consumed by each user and apportion the system overhead costs accordingly. The problem is that we are uncertain how to weight the two sets of figures. Obviously, connect time is more significant than disk usage, but by how much? I'd greatly appreciate it if some of the S.A.'s out there who run systems that charge the users could give me some idea what sort of ratio is generally considered reasonable. I willl summarize if there are any responses of general interest. Thanks. Kathryn Smith (...decvax!gsg!kathy) General Systems Group, Inc. Salem, NH