31 May
2019
31 May
'19
8:04 a.m.
From: "Grant Taylor via cctalk" <cctalk at classiccmp.org> To:
"cctalk mailing list" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Thursday, May 30, 2019 1:30:51 PM
Subject: Process accounting - did anyone ever use it?
(Credit the Quotas thread for prompting this.)
Did anyone ever use process accounting? Did they actually
bill departments
(funny money)? I was always intrigued by process
accounting, but never had a use
for it myself. I guess I can thank process accounting
for
causing the discrepancy
that Cliff Stole tracked down that became The
Cuckoo's
Egg. :-)
Not exactly sure what you are asking about, but if you mean
run time accounting to bill users, then we did this on one
system I managed. We depended on the other department's
contributions to fund the total expenses of the machine
(purchase price plus software and hardware maintenance
contracts), which were pretty expensive on a VAX 11/780.
Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the University's accounting
department, they transferred several thousand $ of "real
money" per month to our account. The bill varied depending
on how much CPU time they used. I wrote some DCL scripts to
roll over the accounting file daily, and then break it down
by user and compute a $ amount based on a formula that had
been agreed upon.
It is Clifford Stoll, IIRC.
Jon