Limiting logons to licensed number: how?

[John Mashey]

Robert Elz	ucbvax!kre  kre at ucb-vax.berkeley.edu writes:
> (But not more logged in).  Disadvantage of this scheme is that you
> can't enable "getty"'s on more lines than you're icenced for,
> even if they won't all be used at once.  (The DEC quota scheme
> doesn't have that restriction).  This also doesn't seem to handle
> net logins at all.
> 
> So, does anyone know what a "user" is ??
> 
Hard to tell.  When I was at Convergent, we settled on a scheme whereby
the kernel had a hard-coded constant of the max number of users.
Login was tweaked to compare the current number of users to the limit and
tell somebody they couldn't login due to exceeding the limit.
It ignored names ending in "uucp" in the count. [Of course, almost nothing
is absolute protection against a knowledgable super-user, but I believe
the intent of the ATT license is to make it difficult for the normal
system administrator to figure out where the limit is and change it.]

This is a fuzzy problem, which exists only due to the peculiarity of
a company selling an operating system that runs on so many different
machines not under the control ofthe original seller.  After all,
vendors have been pricing software for years based on the size of the
machines [their own, of course].  Counting users is
a rough attempt to scale the price of the software to the price of the
hardware, and although has its funnies [after all, an SGI IRIS costs a few
dollars more than a PC running PC/IX, but both are 1-user systems],
its probably as good as any.  IT WOULD BE NICE IF SYS V SUPPORTED SOME
RELATIVELY STANDARDIZED WAY OF DOING IT, AND THEN WE COULD QUIT WASTING
ENERGY BEING INVENTIVE ON THIS PROBLEM.
-- 
-john mashey
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