tish@adiron.UUCP (Todd) (01/15/88)
We have recently been mandated to begin accounting for computer usage based on CPU time. Our situation is that we are running 4.3BSD on one machine and Ultrix 2.0 (No source code) on a second machine. Currently we are using connect time to charge for computer usage. This results in a single user having multiple login names - one per chargable project - for keeping track of connect time. All logins for a given user have the same UID/GID and there exists only one home directory for each set of logins that a given user has. It is somewhat inconvenient for users in that they have to log off and back on (or use /bin/login) to change projects. However it is convenient in that most of our users prefer having to manage only one set of directories. The delivered UNIX software (sa) supports CPU time accounting using the UID to identify the user. This renders our current setup of using multiple logins useless. If we assign unique UIDs for each login, we force users to have several home directories - something we would like to avoid. If we assign a common UID for each user's multiple logins, but a unique GID, then this might help to solve our problem? However without adding an option to sa to use GID, we would have to sort the information using a totally home grown program. Also we cannot modify system source since it is not available on our Ultrix host. I would appreciate any suggestions as to how we can implement an accounting scheme which supports multiple projects per user, and does not force the user to maintain several home directories. -- Thank you - Tish Todd, PAR Technology, New Hartford, NY 13413