Need per-user accounting system

[rwa at auvax.UUCP]

> The word has come down from on high that henceforth we will charge
> for computer use.  Thus I am in need of a system to do per-user
> invoicing from the data collected in /usr/adm/*acct.

Assuming this makes it back ;-) --> we use a package called `ja' from
AIM Technology.  It seems to work ok; it's a little slow at times but then
I have over 700 active user accounts on this box...

Aim advertises in Unix {World,Review,*} and so on.  Their tech support has
been good, see what kind of a discount you can get - we got 50%.

Features: Rates-by-time and charge
groups (not nescessarily matching UIDs, but no reason not to do
that) with semi-privilged group leaders well supported.  Both
detailed and summary reports available via a psuedo natural-language
interface (which doesn't always parse the way you think it ought to
:-)...  Works from /usr/adm/acct, utmp, and has a disk-usage info
collector that you run from the crontab (I run mine hourly).

Drawbacks: ja doesn't understand NFS or the idea of charging
daemon time to users.  I asked them about this, and they thought those
were good ideas, but made no promises.  

The nice thing was that it's all supplied as source - mine ported to
a Sun/3 fairly trivially.  Of course, I didn't *use* that copy!

Sincerely,

Ross Alexander, Sr. Systems Programmer @
Athabasca University, Athabasca, Alberta T0G 2R0
<large-backbone-site>!alberta!auvax!rwa