On Fri, Jul 01, 2005 at 08:13:35AM -0400, Hopson, Russell wrote:
>
> Similar to recent request for SGI accounting software, I am looking for
> Linux accounting software to track NMR spectrometer use. Unfortunately,
> the wtmp files that are generated each month do not accurately account
> for the time the users are on logged into the workstation, and I am not
> sure why.
>
> I would be very interested to hear how other facility managers track
> users time for billing purposes (ie. Reservation systems, actual
> workstation logs, etc).
For a long time I have used cron jobs that run in the middle of
every 10 minute period (our scheduling and billing increment); if
the ps output shows the process characteristic of operation of the
spectrometer, the name of the owner is written to a file (otherwise
just a blank line). Each day at midnight another cron job changes
the file, so I have a set of files, labeled by the day (e.g., 050629)
with 144 lines, each either blank or with the name of the user. (I
write the day of the week to the first line, since our billing is
different for weekends, so they are actually 145 lines long.)
Back when I started this it was because on our solid state instrument
(Chemagnetics, SunOS 4) people weren't scheduling time (my normal
way of doing the billing), and they also were also using the nmr
program for processing separately from running the spectrometer,
and only the latter was to be charged.
Later I began doing the same thing on our Varian instruments
(Solaris). Even though there our setup allowed only one login at
a time, the "last" command was very unreliable under early Solaris
versions, and the more complicated process accounting seemed like
way too much, and still difficult to use.
I wrote some simple perl scripts to combine the scheduling and
logging information and convert it to billing results. Since we
charge differently according to time of day and day of week, it is
fairly simple to assign a charge for each slot and just add them up.
It is not perfectly accurate, but it is close enough for us.
--
Steve Philson philson_at_nmr.chem.umn.edu
Director NMR Lab 612-626-0297
Chemistry Dept. University of Minnesota
Received on Fri Jul 01 2005 - 18:04:11 MST