Accounting under SunOS 4.1

[Jim Duncan]

I've been looking over the accounting stuff in SunOS 4.1, and I would like
to avoid reinventing the wheel.  Does anyone out there run full-blown SunOS
4.1 (or similar SystemV style) accounting on a large number of machines,
e.g. fifty workstations, and if so, do you merge all the info, or run
separate accounting reports for each system?  What tools do you use?

I'm interested in producing one consolidated report for all the machines in
my network.  It looks like it's possible with separate directory heirarchies
for each machine in /var/adm of some specific accounting server and careful
use of acctmerg, but I'd like to hear from someone who's done it.

Total disk usage is easy, albeit slow, if all of the /home filesystems and
/var/spool/mail are mounted with root access on the machine where you're
doing the summary accounting.  I only have three printers (all identical)
which get significant usage, so I can deal with those as a separate problem
although merging printer usage with the other usage would be nice too.  (As
an aside, how much does each page from a laser printer cost at your site?)

In addition, I would really like to be able to produce a daily top-ten
report of overall users of various resources, like printing and disk usage,
and also the top-ten in terms of change from the previous day.  This is
particularly useful for identifying those users who downloaded thirty megs
of (ahem) "interesting" GIFs the night before. :-)

Ultimately, I'd like to include accounting on a few other, non-Sun,
machines, like an Ardent Titan.  Although I haven't looked into this, I
would assume that this is easier now than in the past now that Sun's
accounting is decidedly System-V'ish.

So, how do you do accounting at your site?

Comments and suggestions requested on any and all of the above.  E-mail
responses will be summarized and re-posted.  Please include the current
Subject line as I get a *lot* of mail every day.  My apologies if this has
been discussed in recent months (I have a real hard time keeping up with
news lately).  Thanks in advance.

	Jim

--
   Jim Duncan <jim at math.psu.edu> Penn State Math Dept Systems Administrator
    ``Computers are like Old Testament gods; lots of rules and no mercy.''
						Joseph Campbell