[965] in Kerberos
Network-wide accounting.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Denis.Russell@newcastle.ac.uk)
Tue May 29 17:31:59 1990
Date: Tue, 29 May 90 16:47:20 +0100
From: Denis.Russell@newcastle.ac.uk
To: kerberos@ATHENA.MIT.EDU
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.
The Kerberos system supplies one of the necessities for seamless
distributed processing - authentication, and the concept of a
single distributed-system-wide identity. 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.
Some might even correspond to real money, while others might be
line-printer pages, say, or even entities or tokens generated by
value-added services. All this needs to be done at the
institutional level, above the level of individual machines.
My understanding is that Project Athena does not have any such
accounting concept - though I'm open to immediate correction on
this. However, many Computing Centres are moving strongly
towards cost recovery in various forms, and I believe that
strong generalized network accounting services (quite
independent of individual "hosts" or "machines") are inevitable.
I'm just hoping that someone has devised such a creature so we
don't have to make one ourselves.
Denis Russell
Denis Russell JANET: Denis.Russell@uk.ac.newcastle
Computing Laboratory ARPA: Denis.Russell@newcastle.ac.uk
The University
Claremont Road Tel: (+44) 91 222 8243
Newcastle upon Tyne Fax: (+44) 91 222 8232
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ENGLAND
