30 May
2019
30 May
'19
10:30 a.m.
(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. :-)
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
30 May
30 May
10:51 a.m.
Not sure of the reference in the last paragraph, but I know a company that processes
seafood; clams, lobster, scallops, etc. They track every process so they know exactly what
it cost to produce each product that they sell. The General Ledger had over 1,000
accounts.
----- Original Message -----
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. :-)
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
10:39 p.m.
re: the last paragraph about "Cliff Stole" (actually Clifford Stoll)
and accounting discrepancies:
https://alumni.berkeley.edu/california-magazine/spring-2016-war-stories/how…
?It was a 75-cent accounting error in the computer usage accounts,?
says Stoll, who looked?and still looks?like he stepped straight off
the pages of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. ?I traced the error to
an unauthorized user who had used about nine seconds and not paid for
it.? Stoll assumed the trespasser was a Cal undergraduate doing it on
a lark, ?just some kid on campus who was yanking my chain.?
Fascinated by the challenge of identifying the intruder, he spent the
next ten months trying to solve the puzzle, often sleeping on a cot at
the lab instead of going home, because whoever it was tended to log on
late at night. ?It was like a piece of yarn dangling from a sweater,?
he says. ?You keep pulling on it and discovering that the yarn never
ends. The sweater keeps unraveling until all you end up with is a
mountain of tangles.?
On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 9:55 PM bobh--- via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Not sure of the reference in the last paragraph, but I know a company that processes
seafood; clams, lobster, scallops, etc. They track every process so they know exactly what
it cost to produce each product that they sell. The General Ledger had over 1,000
accounts.
----- Original Message -----
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. :-)
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
31 May
31 May
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
30 May
30 May
12:38 p.m.
On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 11:30:51AM -0600, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
(Credit the Quotas thread for prompting this.)
Did anyone ever use process accounting? Did they actually bill departments
(funny money)?
When I was an undergrad at Drake University the 'academic' VAX, running
VMS 6.mumble, would spit out a monthly accounting report on the DEC
laser printer we had attached to the thing. One of my many jobs was
working the counter where the printer was at, and I was often amused by
how many thousands of dollars I had spent in CPU time that month.
I don't think they did anything with it - if so, my student loans would
have been way way worse than they were - and suspect it was set up when
the thing was originally an 11/750 and carried through the 4000-600 it
was when I was using it and when they shut it off (incidentially, it's
now sitting in my apartment). I think the only real use for the report
was to provide a baseline printer paper order each month....
--
Thomas L. Kula | kula at tproa.net | https://kula.tproa.net/
1 p.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> On Behalf Of Grant Taylor via
cctalk
Sent: 30 May 2019 18:31
To: cctalk mailing list <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
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. :-)
When I worked at Refuge Assurance in Manchester, England we used process accounting on our
Honeywell L66 under GCOS 3.
I don't think we really did detailed charging, but we used the accounting records to
divide up the cost of running the machine among the departments.
I wrote the accounting routing .MBORT7 I think which was a small assembler routine that
ran at the end of every job.
It printed out the charges for store , disk and CPU and wrote to a journal....
I remember years after I left my wife, who worked in the company secretarial department,
which is generally called governance these days, brought a print[out home detailing some
shareholdings.
After she had complained how useless the figures were, she then asked what the extra
figures were on the bottom of the page.
I explained it was a bit of code I wrote, that worked out the cost of the job!. She said
as it was useless she was going to ask for a credit...
... I don't remember if she got one....
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
Dave
G4UGM
2:09 p.m.
On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 2:01 PM Dave Wade via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
Did anyone ever use process accounting? Did they
actually bill departments
(funny money)?
Starting in the 60's, many centralized academic computing centers
(mine included) operated on a cost-recovery basis and had accounting
groups (people) and processes to bill back departments for usage. It
was funny money for some chargebacks (e.g. student allocations) but it
also involved very-real funds when external grants were used to pay
for resources. Most of this disappeared starting in the 90's when
departmental computers became possible.
2:08 p.m.
On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 10:31 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
(Credit the Quotas thread for prompting this.)
Did anyone ever use process accounting? Did they actually bill
departments (funny money)?
I am not billed for it, but the data is collected:
logout
CAnthony.User logged out 05/30/19 1705.9 edt Thu
CPU usage 19 sec, memory usage 2.4 units, cost $1.33.
hangup
Multics has disconnected you
-- Charles
31 May
31 May
6:32 a.m.
On May 30, 2019, at 2:08 PM, Charles Anthony via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 10:31 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I?d get largely the same when logging out of GCOS-8. I?ve rather chuckled at some of the
?bills? that I?ve racked up on my Multics System.
Zane
(Credit the Quotas thread for prompting this.)
Did anyone ever use process accounting? Did they actually bill
departments (funny money)?
I am not billed for it, but the data is collected:
logout
CAnthony.User logged out 05/30/19 1705.9 edt Thu
CPU usage 19 sec, memory usage 2.4 units, cost $1.33.
hangup
Multics has disconnected you
-- Charles 
11:44 a.m.
On 5/31/2019 7:32 AM, Zane Healy via cctalk wrote:
I wonder what the real time on the system was for 19 seconds?
Was there a I/O charge as well on the system?
Is that a real machine or a emulation you are running?
Ben.
On May 30, 2019, at 2:08 PM, Charles Anthony via
cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 10:31 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
I?d get largely the same when logging out of GCOS-8. I?ve rather chuckled at some of the
?bills? that I?ve racked up on my Multics System.
Zane (Credit the Quotas thread for prompting this.)
Did anyone ever use process accounting? Did they actually bill
departments (funny money)?
I am not billed for it, but the data is collected:
logout
CAnthony.User logged out 05/30/19 1705.9 edt Thu
CPU usage 19 sec, memory usage 2.4 units, cost $1.33.
hangup
Multics has disconnected you
-- Charles
12:32 p.m.
On Fri, May 31, 2019 at 11:44 AM ben via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:
chuckled at some
of the ?bills? that I?ve racked up on my Multics System.
They billed for every thing: connect time, disk storage:
Disk usage for 12/31/00 1900.0 est Mon to 12/25/16 1304.4 est Sun
s-qta s-use s-charge d-qta d-use d-charge lev path
------- ------- -------------- ------- ------- -------------- -----
------------------------
229143 47192 $7,662,137.94 204933 733 $116,590.16 0 >
4000 1157 $175,013.75 0 20 1
I am not
billed for it, but the data is collected:
logout
CAnthony.User logged out 05/30/19 1705.9 edt Thu
CPU usage 19 sec, memory usage 2.4 units, cost $1.33.
hangup
Multics has disconnected you
-- Charles
I?d get largely the same when logging out of GCOS-8. I?ve rather
Zane
I wonder what the real time on the system was for 19 seconds?
Was there a I/O charge as well on the system?
Is that a real machine or a emulation you are running?
Ben.
Emulator. 19 seconds wall clock time; the emulated CPU is 6-8x the h/w. system_control_1
1000 504 $10,972.03 0 2 2
system_control_1>syserr_log
400 263 $43,520.67 0 3 1
system_library_obsolete
6000 2823 $476,645.36 1000 30 $4,780.34 1
system_library_standard
6000 2939 $486,339.00 0 2 1
system_library_tandd
6000 2612 $458,486.06 1000 27 $4,442.88 1
system_library_tools
10000 6516 $766,673.19 1000 29 $3,313.04 1
system_library_unbundled
1890 0 3690 1 $160.69 1
user_dir_dir
3000 295 $5,586.83 5000 23 $2,603.30 2
user_dir_dir>SysAdmin
2000 1947 $148,208.64 0 12 3
SysAdmin>admin
5000 13 $2,048.54 5000 9 $1,446.25 2
SysDaemon
1000 2 $321.39 1000 2 $321.39 2
Daemon
100 0 100 2 $321.39 2
Operator
10 0 10 2 $321.39 2
Terminals
5000 0 5000 3 $327.71 2
HFED
1000 451 $93,884.64 100 21 $3,326.68 2
SysEng
1000 71 $448.49 100 1 $160.69 2
Guest
1500 15 $965.93 2000 7 $643.37 1
daemon_dir_dir
500 0 0 1 2
daemon_dir_dir>cards
5000 33 $4,994.39 5000 3 $482.08 1 >site
1000 0 1000 1 $160.69 1
system_library_auth_maint
------- ------- -------------- ------- ------- -------------- -----
------------------------
290543 66833 $10,336,246.50 235933 934 $139,402.04 SUBTOTALS
526476 67767 $10,475,648.50 TOTALS
(SEGMENTS + DIRECTORIES)
30 May
30 May
10:57 p.m.
On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 11:30 AM Grant Taylor via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
(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. :-)
I had it enabled on my FreeBSD boxes and got monthly usage stats. I did it
to make sure that there were no weird users with time, and that the typical
usage was "what I expected". Never detected anything amiss with this, and
at some point I retired all those old boxes and with them the monthly
reporting email.
Warner
31 May
31 May
8:58 a.m.
On 5/30/19 11:57 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
I had it enabled on my FreeBSD boxes and got monthly
usage stats. I did
it to make sure that there were no weird users with time, and that the
typical usage was "what I expected". Never detected anything amiss with
this, and at some point I retired all those old boxes and with them the
monthly reporting email.
*nod*
This use case seems similar to what I did with disk quotas, or at least
why. Sort of a safety measure / monitoring. Not actually using it for
(internal funny money) billing purposes.
--
Grant. . . .
unix || die
1:03 p.m.
On 05/31/2019 08:58, Grant Taylor via cctalk wrote:
On 5/30/19 11:57 PM, Warner Losh wrote:
I believe I've heard about a couple instances where PA was used for
health checks, load distribution, etc for "web-scale" applications on
thousands of servers running Linux. ISTR in one case it was only enabled
when needed for tracking down an issue? But this is hearsay, I'm not
involved in any of the above projects/apps.
But no, not for chargeback so far as I know. I only saw that sort of use
in academia similar to what others have mentioned - departmental
budgeting, grant accounting, etc.
--S.
I had it enabled on my FreeBSD boxes and got
monthly usage stats. I
did it to make sure that there were no weird users with time, and that
the typical usage was "what I expected". Never detected anything amiss
with this, and at some point I retired all those old boxes and with
them the monthly reporting email.
This use case seems similar to what I did with disk quotas, or at least
why.? Sort of a safety measure / monitoring.? Not actually using it for
(internal funny money) billing purposes. 
7:43 p.m.
I believe I've heard about a couple instances
where PA was used for
health checks, load distribution, etc for "web-scale" applications on
thousands of servers running Linux. ISTR in one case it was only enabled
when needed for tracking down an issue? But this is hearsay, I'm not
involved in any of the above projects/apps.
But no, not for chargeback so far as I know. I only saw that sort of use
in academia similar to what others have mentioned - departmental
budgeting, grant accounting, etc.
As a starving undergrad at UC San Diego in the mid 1990s, I remember charge
costs being displayed to us hoi polloi users, and we got a certain amount
of connect and compute time budgeted each week. If you exceeded that, you
got to read a book.
This was probably to discourage MUDders more than anything else, I suspect.
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- "Taking advantage of the obvious performance characteristics of YELLOW!" ---
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14 comments
13 participants
participants (13)
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bfranchuk＠jetnet.ab.ca -
bobh＠tds.net -
cctalk＠gtaylor.tnetconsulting.net -
charles.unix.pro＠gmail.com -
classiccmp＠crash.com -
dave.g4ugm＠gmail.com -
elson＠pico-systems.com -
glen.slick＠gmail.com -
healyzh＠avanthar.com -
imp＠bsdimp.com -
kula＠tproa.net -
pschow＠gmail.com -
spectre＠floodgap.com