Path: utzoo!yunexus!davecb From: davecb@yunexus.UUCP (David Collier-Brown) Newsgroups: comp.protocols.kerberos Subject: Re: Network-wide accounting. Message-ID: <11312@yunexus.UUCP> Date: 30 May 90 12:18:42 GMT Article-I.D.: yunexus.11312 References: Followup-To: comp.protocols.misc Organization: York U. Computing Services Lines: 44 Denis.Russell@newcastle.ac.uk writes: >I don't know whether this is the right mailing list for this >query. If not, then apologies, and please direct me to a more >suitable list. I'm going to claim that comp.protocols.misc is a "right" place, and direct followups there... | One of the other | concepts that I've always thought of as a natural extension of | this is that of network accounting. That is, the allocation of | resources to individuals or "accounts" and the proper accounting | for the "spending" or possible transfer of these resources. I see this as a protocol layered on Kerberos, such that an accounting server gives out accounting tickets (:-)) which in turn contain/accompany kerberos tickets. At the programmatic level, this can be quite easy: for services with a fixed cost per use it only requires linking with a library which overloads the kerberos authentication calls with calls to the accounting service, which in turn depends on kerberos for authentication of the request/response. For services with a variable cost (ie, printers), it requires explicit attention, with calls to both accounting and authentication services. At the protocol level, it looks fairly hard! It does require a distributed database (unless accounting outages are to lock up all the services!) and some carefull study to get it right. | I'm just hoping that someone has devised such a creature so we | don't have to make one ourselves. Well, someone is sure to point out that Athena has been working on a printing service with accounting (Palladium), but when I was there earlier this year they had just put installing it off again until at least the 6.5 release. I suspect (ie, hope) we'll hear a bit about Palladium in this discussion. --dave -- David Collier-Brown, | davecb@Nexus.YorkU.CA, ...!yunexus!davecb or 72 Abitibi Ave., | {toronto area...}lethe!dave Willowdale, Ontario, | "And the next 8 man-months came up like CANADA. 416-223-8968 | thunder across the bay" --david kipling