Accounting Enhancements to IAS/PDS

Richard E. Evans
Metcalf & Eddy, Inc.
50 Staniford Street
Boston, Mass 02114
617 367-4288

The existing IAS/PDS system has two weaknesses that make the

implementation of an in-house timesharing system difficult.



The first weakness is the fact that IAS/PDS ties security

and accounting tightly together. In an engineering office this

is a problem because each employee should be able to accumulate

system resource utilization charges for any number of accounts.

In other words system security (LOGIN passwords) should be keyed

to employees; while accounting (connect time, disk storage,

etc.) should be keyed to active projects of the firm (accounts).



The other weakness is the inadequate amount of resource

utilization statistics that are captured and stored by IAS. IAS

simply accumulates two statistics (cummulative connect time and

core-ticks) for each user during an accounting period. Data that

are required to charge clients for use of computing resources,

such as the following, are not collected:

1. Connect time by session and person.

2. Batch vs. timesharing usage.

3. Usage of particular programs.

4. Disk storage usage.



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To strengthen these weaknesses M & E has implemented

enhancements to the IAS/PDS accounting. These enhancements have

been implemented by means of patching in "hooks" to PDS at

strategic locations. These "hooks" are in two locations in PDS:

in the LOGIN/LOGOUT processing module; and in the subtasking

module.



These enhancements includes changes to the password

verfication routine and additions to the subtasking routine to

gather statistics on task usage. These enhancements work as an

addition to, not as a replacement for, the regular PDS LOGIN and

accounting.


To get a complete set of listings execute the PDS command

file LISTINGS.CMD. The complete documentation is in MAEACT.DOC.