Date: Tue, 19 Aug 1997 15:57:09 -0700 (PDT) From: michael@blueneptune.com To: brandon@roguetrader.com (Brandon Gillespie) Cc: nick@calyx.net, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: WinNT to FreeBSD Message-ID: <199708192257.PAA22637@rainey.blueneptune.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.3.96.970819155343.5038A-100000@roguetrader.com> from "Brandon Gillespie" at Aug 19, 97 04:07:38 pm
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> > Actually I heard it wasn't possible to track any information like that > > with FreeBSD. That may be the one edge that NT has in this competition. > > It is. Everything is logged. You can either use the 'last' command [man > last(1)], or write your own interface to the last log [man utmp(5)]. Both > of these options are trivial. I am not as sure what to do if you want to > know byte information, a simple approach may be to have their logout > script call netstat, ala: It would be really cool if pppd were modified to use RADIUS for authentication and accounting. (As an option, of course.) The information logged with the accounting records is extremely handy, and -does- include the byte transfer count. Of course, pppd would also have to be modified to retrieve that info, but that should be possible to do without too much difficulty. There are already good perl scripts that can process RADIUS log files for all of the desired accounting information. That would go a long way to improving the user-tracking capabilities of FreeBSD. Even though I agree that nobody should be running an ISP unless they have the technical expertise to gather this information from existing tools, it would be far better if all of this was just a simple matter of starting up some simple program (with an optional slick graphical interface ;-), selecting the right options, and getting your monthly accounting report, which you can then just feed into your billing software. No need for every single ISP to reinvent the wheel. :-) [And I'm going to play the idea-man-without-time-to-do-the-work card on this one, I'm afraid. It would be fun to do this work, but I definitely don't have the time. My days are already 27 hours long, or so it seems...] -- Michael Bryan michael@blueneptune.com
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