Computer Usage Billing Recommendations [closed]

Question

We have several scientific machines that we allow users from other companies to use and at the moment we are billing them for their time using a pen and paper method. All of the machines are attached to Windows XP PCs and all of the users have domain (Samba sadly) accounts which they are logged in to for the duration of them using the equipment.

We would like to have an automatic billing system for these users. It could either collect the data by running as an application in the background or query the Samba logs at the end of the week.

Most of the billing apps I've looked at are for internet cafes, where the billing is done in reverse to what we need.

Answer 1

By using both log on and log off scripts you can produce a log of which accounts are used, on which machines and for how long. I do this by simply echoing the date and time to a log file. No great science there.

Once logged you can use whatever method you like to extract the data. I have a personal preference for Perl, which makes it child's play to gather the data and store it in a database, MySQL in my case. From there I use an Access database as a front end, because it's already on the machine anyway and provides quite good reporting facilities.

Total cost: $0
Time to set up: An hour or less.