trackerd

(Log usage of tracked programs)

Synopsis | Description | See Also | Author

SYNOPSIS

trackerd

DESCRIPTION

trackerd accepts UDP packets from the tracker program and for each valid packet prints a log message to standard output. That log message will be of the form:

    <username>@<host> <program>

where <username> is the username of the person running the program (possibly just the UID if tracker couldn't map that to a username), <host> is the IP address of the host where the program was run, and <program> is the name of the program invoked. There is no authentication.

This is intended to be a very lightweight usage monitor. It is not intended to be foolproof, and is certainly not a substitute for a license server. It is intended to help answer questions like "is anyone using this any more?" or "about how many people run this program a day?" and does not attempt to be foolproof or spoof-proof. The assumption is that the sorts of questions being answered are ones where users will be willing to cooperate with the monitoring.

trackerd does not attempt to manage process groups or do tty disassociation, on the grounds that such actions should be done by specialized programs that know exactly what to do. It also doesn't use syslog, since if you're tracking a large quantity of programs syslog will be too slow. It runs as a daemon to avoid inetd and so forth. Its output should probably be directed to multilog for timestamps and log rotation. Alternately, one could direct the output to splogger to send it to syslog.

SEE ALSO

tracker(1)

multilog is part of the daemontools package, which is available from <http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html>.

The current version of this program is available from its web page at <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/software/tracker/>.

AUTHOR

Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org>, based on a network protocol by Larry Schwimmer <opusl@stanford.edu>.