Counting FilePro licenses

[Flavius Moldovan]

Thank you Brian. I agree with your point regarding "basic respect". However, my boss has been working with FilePro for over 20 years and he doesn't have problems understanding seat/license/connection terminology. But, he is the one who makes the financial decisions and I am left to deal with the technical stuff (I have to solve the problems with the resources I have).

Thank you for the nice awk example. 

Flavius.


On Mar 11, 2011, at 2:21 PM, Brian K. White wrote:

> On 3/10/2011 9:57 PM, Flavius Moldovan wrote:
>> Richard,
>> 
>> Sorry, I forgot to mention that the FilePro is running on linux RedHat 4.4.
>> 
>> Following your advice, I will use the following to count the processes. Is this enough?
>> 
>> 	ps  -ef|grep -E "dclerk|dreport"|grep -v grep|awk '{print $6}'|sort|uniq|wc -l
> 
> OK first thing, won't buy more licenses? My answer to that would be a 
> simple "Ok well I guess you don't really care if it works or not 
> then..." it automatically becomes not your problem at that point as far 
> as I'm concerned. Basic respect. They'll happily waste hours of your 
> time to save a few hundred bucks? Your time is worth more than that.
> 
> Just don't use the word "seats" when talking to customers and the number 
> of required licenses becomes less of an issue. It's "instances", and 
> they need however many they need, if it's average 5 instances per user 
> plus 10 more for server-side reporting or web site activity then so be 
> it. All depends on usage.
> 
> But my real purpose was a fine, perhaps nitpicky point but if you're 
> going to use awk anyways, you don't need ANY of the other processes in 
> that pipe. Just the single awk can do the entire job in one process. 
> Although it's admittedly a little arcane in the scrunched up minimal 
> form I'm going to use for posting.
> 
> This will tell you the total number of rclerk/dclerk/rreport/dreport 
> running at the moment.
> 
> ps -eopid,comm |awk '/(r|d)(clerk|report)/{n++}END{print n}'
> 
> That simple rule is correct for 5.0.13 and below.
> 
> But that doesn't account for the fact that in 5.6, processes spawned by 
> other processes don't count extra. I'm not sure how true that is or if 
> the real rule used inside fp is more complicated or if it's possibly 
> configurable or even variable.
> 
> I don't use 5.6 for several reasons so I can't test how accurately this 
> matches fp's own counting rules, but here is a version of above that 
> doesn't count a clerk/report process if it was started by any other 
> clerk or report process:
> 
> ps -eopid,ppid,comm |awk '/(r|d)(clerk|report)/{p[$1]=$2;t++}END{for(x 
> in p)for(y in p)if(p[x]==y){delete p[x];t--};print t
> }'
> 
> This one just adds a little verbosity to show all the potential 
> processes under consideration followed by the discards. Pipe that into 
> less to verify the PID/PPID relationship of the discards yourself before 
> trusting the non-verbose one.
> 
> ps -eopid,ppid,comm |awk '/(r|d)(clerk|report)/{p[$1]=$2;t++;print 
> $0}END{print "----";print "total",t;for(x in p)for(y in
> p)if(p[x]==y){print "discarding",x;delete p[x];t--};print "remander",t}' 
> |less
> 
> 
> Each of these are a single long line.
> 
> -- 
> bkw
> 
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