System Accounting

[Kathryn Smith]

	This is primarily directed at the System Administrators out there.  
Our accounting department has recently decided that we should keep better
track of what computer resources are being used on our consulting projects,
rather than just keeping track of the man hours involved, and I'm trying to
put together a package to do this.  

	I am not using the standard Unix accounting reports for several reasons.
We are running 4.2BSD on one machine, and System V on the other, but would like
the reports to be compatible.  Also, we have become aware of several small 
problems with the standard system accounting on the 4.2 system, which have 
been fixed, but we don't have source on the System V machine, and aren't sure
we trust it.

	What I am doing at the moment is collecting the total connect time
for each account over a period of a week, plus the average disk usage for each
account, figured each week.  Accounting can then determine what percentage
of the total available time/space is consumed by each user and apportion the
system overhead costs accordingly.  The problem is that we are uncertain how
to weight the two sets of figures.  Obviously, connect time is more significant
than disk usage, but by how much?  I'd greatly appreciate it if some of the
S.A.'s out there who run systems that charge the users could give me some 
idea what sort of ratio is generally considered reasonable.  I willl 
summarize if there are any responses of general interest.  Thanks.

						Kathryn Smith
						(...decvax!gsg!kathy)
						General Systems Group, Inc.
						Salem, NH