Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!think!ames!oliveb!jerry
From: jerry@oliveb.olivetti.com (Jerry Aguirre)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Arbitron "Users" count is very wrong under BSD
Message-ID: <13348@oliveb.olivetti.com>
Date: 20 Jan 88 20:14:15 GMT
References: <15538@onfcanim.UUCP> <1978@s.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: jerry@oliveb.UUCP (Jerry Aguirre)
Organization: Olivetti ATC; Cupertino, Ca
Lines: 23

In article <1978@s.cc.purdue.edu> rsk@s.cc.purdue.edu.UUCP (Rock Wombat) writes:
>This can also result in a count that is too low.  On our systems, we zero
>the utmp and wtmp files every 24 hours, so this pipeline would only reveal
>those users who have logged in since the last zap.  I'm not sure that there's
>a good solution to this problem; is there a general way to answer the question
>"How many active users does this machine have?" that avoids this difficulty?

How about extracting home directories from the password file and then
checking to see if they have a .login or .profile that has been accessed
in the measurement interval.  This will filter out inactive users and
daemon logins (UUCP).

Of course users with multiple accounts will still show up as more than
one person but I see no automatic way to avoid that.  That problem is
even worse here because I send in reports for 5 systems.  Many of the
users have secondary accounts on other systems so they get counted
multiple times.  What I really need is a way to merge the data from the
5 systems and submit a single report with duplicates merged.  I am sure
that other sites using NNTP for reading have the same problem.  It is
common at some sites for a new user to automatically get an account on
every system.

					Jerry Aguirre @ Olivetti ATC