Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!att!emory!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!boulder!daemon
From: pte900@jatz.aarnet.edu.au (Peter Elford)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.sys.cisco
Subject: Re: Cisco IP accounting
Message-ID: <29347@boulder.Colorado.EDU>
Date: 7 Nov 90 07:56:17 GMT
Sender: news@boulder.Colorado.EDU
Lines: 33


>From robel2@mythos.ucs.indiana.edu Wed Nov  7 15:49:02 1990
>
>>Perhaps it might be more useful to allow some sort of "masked" 
>>counting to be done, ie. so that totals can be collected on a 
>>per net or subnet basis, eg.
>
>I suggested exactly this to cisco a few months ago but, alas, 
>they do not feel that this would be all that useful.  I personally 
>feel that their IP accounting feature as it stands now is virtually 
>useless if you have to account for much more than several subnets.  
>We have 45 local subnets and will be hosting a state network 
>comprised of god-knows-how-many subnets in the near future.  
>There's just no way to do accounting strictly on a host basis on 
>this scale.

I agree. 

I have found ip accounting only useful for problem diagnosis (and
in this scenario it is VERY useful). Any other use involves too
much work to retrieve the data from the router at frequent
intervals and then fiddly post-processing to get it into something
useful (which is not necessary with NNstat, for example).

Did cisco give any reasons why they did not wish to pursue some
sort of filtered accounting ?

Peter Elford,                                   e-mail: P.Elford@aarnet.edu.au
Network Co-ordinator,                           phone: +61 6 249 3542
Australian Academic Research Network,           fax: +61 6 247 3425
c/o, Computer Services Centre,                  post: PO Box 4
Australian National University                        Canberra 2601
Canberra, AUSTRALIA