tracker

Description

This is a system for doing lightweight usage tracking of binaries. We use it at Stanford to answer questions like "is anyone using this package any more?", "do we have too many Matlab licenses allocated?", or "what departments are using SAS the most?" It is not designed to be foolproof or impossible to bypass; it's just a transparent layer in front of binaries that logs each time a user runs a given binary (using a UDP packet to a central server).

This package contains a client and server, both written in C. Neither is more than 200 lines of code, including comments.

Requirements

tracker is written in C and therefore requires a C compiler to install. The trackerd daemon was written to run well under supervise and multilog from Dan Bernstein's daemontools package and needs something similar to those programs to start it and manage its output.

Download

The distribution:

Documentation:

• README
• tracker manual page
• trackerd manual page

License

Copyright 1999, 2003 Board of Trustees, Leland Stanford Jr. University

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.