application and user logging

[Russ Allbery]

Petros Triantafyllidis <trian@itc.auth.gr> writes:

>   Has anybody developed an application-usage monitoring tool under AFS?

> More specifically, we intend in our University campus to check whether
> some programs are used or not, in order to re-organize our purchasing
> policy. Therefore, we are looking for a cross-plattform solution (Unices,
> Windows) to monitor the use of AFS, both in terms of users ticketing and 
> applications use as well, while a further plan is to show the results on
> the web in real time.

I have a Unix-only solution that involves wrappering all the binaries
whose usage you want to track so that rather than running the actual
binary, the user first runs a small C program that sends a UDP packet to a
tracking host and then execs the real binary.  It's not robust in the face
of users trying to intentionally bypass it, but it works pretty well
otherwise.

I have no idea if the same thing would work for Windows, since I know very
little about Windows and am interested in knowing less, but it's a pretty
small program.

It's not bundled up for distribution, but I can mail you a tarball of the
code if that sounds interesting.  Warning:  The only documentation is the
comments at the beginnings of the source files, but it's all pretty short
and easy to understand.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu)             <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>