[474] in athena10
Re: counterlog design discussion
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Aug 27 15:26:10 2008
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
To: Kenneth Arnold <kcarnold@mit.edu>
Cc: athena10@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <48B59529.5060504@mit.edu>
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Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:25:23 -0400
Message-Id: <1219865124.17864.9.camel@equal-rites.mit.edu>
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On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 13:55 -0400, Kenneth Arnold wrote:
> Python's batteries include a 'syslog' package that will do exactly that
> in a line or two. But why syslog?
All 9.4 machines already have remote syslogging configured, so a script
can just run logger to cheaply send an unreliable message to an existing
data collection server. Anything else would have required more work at
the time.
Geoffrey Thomas wrote:
> How is this generated? What is considered as a reinstall and what is
> considered a distinct machine? What happens with live CDs?
The MAC address as reported by ifconfig in the "HWaddr" field. This
gets a little trickier in Athena 10 because you can't just look for the
value of NETDEV in /etc/athena/rc.conf to find out what network
interface to use, but I'm not too worried about finding a way to do this
part.
The ID is only generated once, and is retrieved from a file afterwards.
So, if you replace the hardware (or even just the network card) and then
reinstall, the mac address changes. This can certainly result in
double-counting seats within a given month, especially if hardware
renewal is happening in a cluster.
