Re: Is accounting supported?

[Daniel Wagner <wagi monom org>]

On 01/07/2010 05:27 PM, Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 08:18 +0000, Alex Buell wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-01-06 at 22:51 -0800, Dan Williams wrote:
> > > On Tue, 2010-01-05 at 14:31 +0530, Elison Niven wrote:
> > > > Hi List,
> > > >
> > > > I am using Network manager with Gnome network applet on Fedora 12.
> > > >
> > > > Are there any options for getting accounting like information about connect
> > > > times, data bytes in and out etc?
> > >
> > > Not yet, but I've been trying to get somebody interested in doing the
> > > feature since I'm swamped with a bunch of other stuff at this point.  It
> > > shouldn't be too bad; we just keep a sqlite database around of all
> > > connection start/stop/bytecounts and then expose that as a D-Bus
> > > interface that applets can read.  Either somebody needs to step up or I
> > > guess just wait until I get around to it.
> >
> > I'd like to volunteer to do this. I'll get around to it over the weekend
> > and send you patches if you like. All I need is a list of desired
> > features and I'll implement it. Just my way of contributing to NM!
>
> Excellent!  I put a summary of what I think should be done here:
>
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=601372
>
> Does the stuff in Comment #3 sound doable?  You don't have to do
> everything at the start but we can do it incrementally.  Like you don't
> need to populate the "user-id" and "user-name" fields yet, since we need
> to do a bit more internally to NM to store that information in the
> NMActRequest structure (by pulling the uid off the D-Bus request to
> start the connection).
>
> Let me know if you have any questions.

Just out of curiosity: where does the accounting information come from? 
I see one possible solution using netfilter with ULOG target and the 
ulogd daemon.

I guess when using ulogd there is always a certain lag between the 
number of bytes transferred/received and the user defined maximum of 
bytes transferred/received (probably enforced by PolicyKit). I don't 
think that's a real problem and could be workaround if there isn't the 
need to have exact numbers.

thanks,
daniel