Reading accountng file records

[Steve Nimr]

I'm working on a VMS 6.2 system that the last new accounting file was in 1996, yes it's huge and extremely fragmented. It seems sometime between now and 1996 the system time/date were way off and I have hundreds of accounting records in the year 2058. I get error messages from the accounting utility about record nnnnn having a future date. They seem to be legitimate records so I have to keep them (qualified system). Is there any way to view or search the accounting file by record number so I can figure out the approximate real date the records occurred. For example it says record 200 is out of date. Can I look at record 199 or 201? I wish the number was that small then it would be easy to do manually.

Before I get blasted - I am pushing for approval to run a procedure that recreates that file and other type files monthly.

[Jeffery D. Urmann]

Hey Steve,

The accounting file is just a sequential file. You could convert/share it; then write a program to parse the resulting file. The structure of the accounting file was documented someplace, I just don`t recall where. I`ll have a look around tomorrow.

Hope that gets you started.

Enjoy,

--Jeff

[David B Sneddon]

Hi Steve,

Since you want to keep the information indefinitely,
what is the problem with running your monthly job
and renaming the previous version of the file for
archiving?
With the accounting file along with operator
log files and security logs, you will eventually run
out of disk space... If you rename the previous
files and move them to some archive location off
the system disk I don't see how you could not
get approval (but then I have had to deal with
some very strange people :-)


Regards
Dave

[Tom O'Toole]

If you haven't already, you should do a set accounting/new to cut a new one, and backup/delete (or equiv.) the
accounting file somewhere else (which should have the effect of defragmenting it).

The file format was documented in the docset when it was changed from a simple format to a more complex one at V2->v3. The more complex format uses offsets within the record to fields, most of which are counted strings.... There are programs/routines around from Decus, etc... which can read the file. I think the date is in the fixed length portion of the record so it shouldn'tbe to bad a program to write.

[Steve Nimr]

David,
I have been extracting out monthly record to a new disk. However, what I'm trying to achieve is getting accurate accounting reports based on certain time frames, such as month by month useage for a UIC group or a queue. The gaps by the out of date range records really throw off the useage.

This computer system is used as a qualified manufacturing system. Any changes that weren't declared when the system was set up, even a new accounting file unless there was a procedure in place to make new files and it was documented at system setup, can revoke the system's qualification and all the products produced after the change go the the trash. So it does take a lot of signatures for minor changes that are second nature to most sysadmins. Frustrating doesn't describe looking after a poorly setup system that you can't correct.

[Phil.Howell · Accepted solution]

On the freeware cd there is a utility called acc_convert that converts accountng files to a "fixed-width" format. It includes definitions of the file contents.
Phil

[Steve Nimr]

Thanks Phil, I'll try that.