Dear AMMRL:
We charge for NMR time according to login time on the spectrometer computer
for our manually operated spectrometers. They all run Linux and my accounting
program reads the “last” files to find the login times. I have
done this for many years without an issue being made of it, but now there is
concern that users may be gaming the accounting system by logging in, starting an
experiment, logging out, then maybe just logging back in later after the experiment
is done to remove the sample, thus having one or two short logins instead of one
login that includes the entire acquisition.
I know that some facilities just use acquisition time from the Bruker “account” information,
but on principle I do not want to do that, since that fails to charge for actual
time occupied on the instrument which will always exceed acquisition time,
sometimes substantially.
I’m tasked with fixing this vulnerability.
One option is to find a way to prevent users from running data collection while
they are not logged into the spectrometer computer. I have no idea how to do this.
Has anyone done this, particularly for a Bruker spectrometer? The only thing I can
think of is possibly to have the OS detect a process and kill it, maybe the TopSpin
process, but that would be very unceremonious and maybe not safe.
A second option is to take the Bruker “account” files for each
individual day in the month and write additional code for my accounting program
to read and interpret these and use them to correct the accounting in case of
discrepancies, which would be cases when acquisition time exceeded login time. I
might be able to do this, but do not want to be required to go in each month, on
each spectrometer, and use the Bruker “account” command many times to
separately bring up and save about 30 files one for each day then combine them
into a single input file for the program. This is kind of maddening manual work.
Does anyone have a script that can be typed on the TopSpin command line to get
the account data for every individual day in a month written out as one file? Or
any advice on writing such a script? ( Also, now that I think more about it, I’m not
sure how these “account” files deal with acquisitions of more than one day
and if policing longer acquisitions requires every possible multiple-day “account”
file for the month.)
Does anyone have another way to get around this problem? Must admit I’m not
keen on throwing my accounting program out the window, as it has worked well for many
years and provides yearly as well as monthly reports.
Please help.
Margaret
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#2744): https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://ammrl.groups=
.io/g/main/message/2744__;!!PvDODwlR4mBZyAb0!Vf9C9KoMz3FfLwVqY_eRVfMbKkNsky=
VwP6i-u0mkK7k6IzOdroMJbMPMUntYLn76P_AY4Rh9CI2Nq5dfcPxSQLS2RqiB$
Mute This Topic: https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://groups.io/mt/114891633=
/7559972__;!!PvDODwlR4mBZyAb0!Vf9C9KoMz3FfLwVqY_eRVfMbKkNskyVwP6i-u0mkK7k6I=
zOdroMJbMPMUntYLn76P_AY4Rh9CI2Nq5dfcPxSQOwFJLfQ$
Group Owner: main+owner_at_ammrl.groups.io
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Received on Mon Aug 25 2025 - 16:15:39 MST