Turning system accounting data into money

[Christopher J. Ruwe]

On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 16:06:19 +0200
Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de> wrote:

> This is _not_ a spam message trying to sell something
> stupid to the list. I'm just searching for a solution
> to turn consumed computing resources into a number and
> a currency symbol. :-)
> 
> Reason: A growing amount of (my) customers seems to
> like this concept: They speed a low fee for access to
> systems and applications, and they want to pay according
> to what they did with that system. The access fee covers
> access and some basic services (backup & quota), and for
> anything "more advanced" they want to be charged per
> "units" used, or per "consumed resources". This can be dialog
> time (SSH), disk I/O, disk occupied, pages printed (can happen)
> or pages required to print on exceptional specific forms
> (can happen once or twice a year and is charged with an
> additional fee for fold, staple & mutilate).
> 
> Sounds stupid? I have _real_ customers intendedly
> requesting that payment model (instead of "just pay
> amount n Euro a month and do whatever you like").
> 
> Accidentally, I remembered history.
> 
> So I thought: This funcitonality has been present on
> UNIX systems for many decades. But _how_ to use it? I
> know there's the command set for accounting, for example
> the "ac" command. But what does its output "total 7264.15"
> mean? There also are "acct" (process accounting), "sa"
> (for system accounting) and "pac" (for printer accounting,
> just dooesn't seem to work with CUPS).
> 
> I'd also like to use the /etc/csh.logout resp. ~/.logout
> mechanism. When a user logs in, he will be presented the
> program he uses (or a menu, in case he uses different ones).
> This can also be a regular "remote desktop" session. When
> he logs out, a message should be displayed that informs
> him how much will be charged for the session. At the end
> of the month, he should get an invoice with the proper
> accumulated amount.
> 
> For example, if a user wishes to issue a "make a backup
> _now_, because I intendedly want _this_ current state
> backed up _now_", this will be seen as additional I/O
> load and disk occupation (because it's handled aside of
> the regular backup runs that should be part of the
> "basic package" charged with the "conneciton fee").
> Or as I said, he issues printing for stuff he cannot
> print at home, so he will be charged for 500 pages.
> And in case he transfers 10 GB data in, and 10 GB data
> out, he will be charged for that traffic, as well as
> for the I/O.
> 
> The sessions in questions will be SSH sessions (text mode)
> as well as SSH/X sessions (remote desktops).
> 
> Maybe someone already uses something similar he wants
> to share? Suggestions and inspirations are welcome.
> 
> 

Cannot be of any direct help, but ...

You remember that 'astronomer chases hacker on Berkely computer
systes'- novel, Cliff Stoll: The Cookoo's Egg? If not, try wikipedia. As an aside, I was told that at some universities' CS-classes, it is required lecture. In that novel, user's departments where charged according to resources spent on the university's computers and the main figure was tasked to find out about a 0.75$ accounting error and found a hacker instead. The system in the novel was a Berkeley Unix. So, systems that do what you want (and customers who want to pay on a per use basis) must be around for quite some time.  The novel is copyrighted 1989, I cannot track when the real event circling around a certain Markus Hess, cf. also wikipedia, took place. My guess about the system is  4.3BSD Tahoe or earlier 4.3BSD.

Cheers,
-- 
Christopher J. Ruwe
TZ GMT + 2