Accounting woes for HCX/UX 3.0

[Paul De Bra]

In article <207 at h.cs.wvu.wvnet.edu> fuhrman at b.coe.wvu.wvnet.edu (Cris Fuhrman) writes:
>I hope someone out there has had some experience with the HCX/UX 3.0
>version of unix running on an HCX-9 computer.  It seems that accounting
>has a serious problem with the size of its data types for things like
>KCORE minutes and stuff like that.  These values appear negative in the
>reports (daily and monthly) for userids with large values (i.e. the values
>overflow causing the sign bit to come on)...

This happens on all Unix systems I have seen so far (except the ones that
don't run accounting:-)
The kernel keeps the time in some weird format, mainly to avoid floating-
point operations and still have fractional numbers. This format exists for
historical reasons I believe (dating back to when float operations were
slow, but that is still true for 286 and 386 boxes without coprocessor, so
it still makes sense).

So it is unlikely that it will be fixed in a future version of your
particular Unix, unless AT&T changes the format for all future Unixes.

Paul.
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