Re: [vulture@aoi.dyndns.org: Bug#100744: Binary should be in /usr/bin, since it's useful to non-admins.]
On 06/17/2001 08:41:56 AM Manfred Wassmann wrote:
>> On Fri, 15 Jun 2001, Josselin Mouette wrote:
>>
>> > Comme Manfred Wassmann disait l'ôt' jour :
>> > >
>> > > Network load. Keeping users from running expensive traceroute probes
when
>> > > a simple ping would suffice.
>> >
>> > The current place in /usr/sbin doesn't prevent users to use
traceroute.
>> > If you want this, you'd better remove the execution permissions.
>>
>> Sorry, but you didn't get the point. As I said I do _not_ want to
prevent
>> people from using traceroute. But I think it is an issue to prevent
>> casual use of a rather expensive network analyzing tool, which the
>> current setup does.
It's not "a rather expensive network analyzing tool".
Please quantify the costs of a traceroute compared to net connectivity,
electrical power, and labor.
In a reply to the original email, I very conservatively calculated in the
midwestern USA, the labor cost of a traceroute is twenty five million times
the network costs, and the electrical power load of the PC is ten thousand
times the cost of the network connectivity.
Oddly enough, a "large" portion of the cost of a traceroute is the
depreciation of the PC, if it's a fairly cutting edge box. If you assume a
$4000 machine that loses half it's value in 6 months, that'd be about 0.77
cents per minute (a cent is a hundredth of a dollar), which makes
depreciation about five hundred thousand times more expensive than the
network connectivity cost, or about ten times the cost of the electricity
to run the box.
I figure traceroute takes up maybe 1/5500 of a CDRom, as a wild guess. So
traceroute costs about 0.18 cents to buy, which is about one fourth the
cost of a PC's depreciation for running it once, or perhaps a hundred
thousand times more expensive than the network costs of running it once.
I've considered writing a little KDE applet that would account for total
dollars spent by a workstation on net access, power, etc. I'll probably
never have the spare time to do that, but it's an interesting concept.
If you could inform us of the "expensive" network cost of a traceroute
(Let's say, 8Kbit of data), as compared to your typical admin labor cost
for 1 minute and about one hundredth of a kilowatt-hour of electricity,
where you live, that would be interesting.
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