• We’re currently investigating an issue related to the forum theme and styling that is impacting page layout and visual formatting. The problem has been identified, and we are actively working on a resolution. There is no impact to user data or functionality, this is strictly a front-end display issue. We’ll post an update once the fix has been deployed. Thanks for your patience while we get this sorted.

Process accounting under Linux?

S

Sunner

Elite Member
I've recently began poking around with the process accounting features of Linux.
Having never messed with that before, it seems like it's a little used feature, based on what i can find(or rather, can't find) on Google.
Most everything is either a very quick mention of the same ancient and very brief guide from 1997 or thereabouts, or a very quick mention about it's existance in general.

Basically, I'm just looking for any helpful info about it that anyone can muster, be it docs, helpful software, etc etc 🙂

And yeah, I know it's vague, which is why I said "any" 😉
 
top isn't quite what I'm looking for 😉

Process accounting is basically logging everything that's run on the box.
If you want a more thorough explanation, have a look at this.
That's the guide that keeps showing up everywhere I look, unfortunately it's ancient and doesn't go beyond the basics.
 
What do you want to accomplish?

Manage account quotas? Sell proccessing time on a Linux server (ala mainframe style stuff)? Render farms?

I don't think that the kernel developers are to keen on things like that. At least it's not a priority.. I don't think that there is any easy way to do it accurately.

Doing some searches with apt-cache in Debian found me this stuff. I've seen it before and played with it a bit, but didn't see any use for it for me.

BSD-style process accounting in Linux programs. Have to make sure the option for it is enabled in your kernel.
cat /boot/config-`uname -r`|grep BSD

GNU System process and login accounting tools:
http://directory.fsf.org/acct.html



edit:

Haha! look what I found. 🙂
http://elsa.sourceforge.net/
 
Well, the OS used is Redhat EL 4, so BSD accounting is enabled by default, and it's working just fine 🙂

In the end I'm just looking for some tools to make it more..."manageable" so to speak.
Basically, in the end we'll have to try to gather all the logs on a central server, but before we even start working on that I wanna try to make them a tad more useful than they are right now.
The HP management tools are spamming modprobe's every minute for example.

Anyways, I'm not looking for a solution to a specific problem so much as I'm looking for something to make management of these logs a tad easier.
To draw a paralell, if I was looking for something similar for an IPTables firewall that was already up and running, giving me a pointer to fwbuilder would be a great help 😉
 
I'd betcha that there is a whole crapload of Perl scripts and Perl modules to make this stuff easier to manage.

Otherwise I don't have a clue.

 
Well, that's the thing, right now I'm feeling like I'm the only one trying to make use of this 🙂

Ah well, we're working on some ideas now...time will tell if we'll get something useful out of it, or if we're just wasting our time 😉
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

TRENDING THREADS

Back
Top