how do you handle multiple accounts? - (nf)

[mwm at ea.UUCP]

#R:sri-arpa:-146000:ea:13400008:000:987
ea!mwm    Jul 12 17:48:00 1984

We had a similar problem: we do consulting work, and need to charge CPU
time back to clients (Gotta pay for the VAX somehow). We used the group
codes to handle it.

Everybody logs into a program called project, which asks for an account
number to bill this session to. It then sets the group ID to that number
(after checking that it's a valid number) and execl's a shell. Project can
also be run interactively to fire up multiple shells to work on different
projects, etc. The only thing after that was a program to read
/usr/adm/acct (thanks to uokvax!raymond), and an awk script to turn what
falls out of the program into hours.

The problem is, you either have to be running a system with mutli-group
processes (4.2), or give up group protection for the ids involved. We run
4.2 so the project program would have to be modified to handle
non-multi-group systems.

This all works with no changes to the system, etc. I'll post/mail the three
programs involved if someone asks.

	<mike