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Accounting Utilities Manual

The FTP Problem

I've tested the standard ac in Ultrix 4.2 (DECstation/DECsystem), SunOS 4.1.1 (Sun3, Sun4, Sparc), Mach 2.5 (Omron/Luna), and DomainOS 10.3 (DN3500). All of these acs have trouble parsing entries in which the line is ftpxxxx (xxxx being some number). Whenever these acs see one of these entries, they log everyone out at the time of the entry.

HOW IT HAPPENS: if there is a user logged into the machine when an ftp connection occurs, (minimally) you'll get a login record for the user, a login record for the ftp connection, and the logouts for both afterwards (in either order).

TANGIBLE RESULT: the user who was logged in gets 'logged out' at the time the ftp connection begins, and none of the time spent during or after the ftp connection. Therefore, when you run GNU ac, the totals will most likely be greater than those of your system's ac (provided you specify the other flags that will make GNU ac behave like the system's).