Cost or Cost Factor is used by WAN policies to determine the relative expense of WAN traffic. In policies, you can use DestCost to determine whether to send traffic or not.
A cost factor is expressed as expense per unit of time. It can be in any units as long as the same units are used consistently on each Cost Detail page and in each WAN traffic policy. Thus you can use dollars per hour, cents per minute, yen per second, or any other ratio of expense to time, as long as you use that ratio exclusively.
Cost or Cost Factor must be given as a non-negative integer.
You can assign destination cost factors representing the relative expense of traffic to particular address ranges. Therefore, you can assign cost for an entire group of servers in one declaration. You can also assign a default cost factor, to be used when no cost is specified for a destination.
The cost factors are stored in an address cost list on the server, in the NetWare Server object, or in the LAN Area object. When wtm.nlm receives a get WAN policy request, it looks up the destination address for the proposed traffic. If that address falls within the address range of the server, it assigns the associated cost to the system variable DestCost. If not, it checks the LAN Area object's address range. If the destination address falls within the LAN Area object's range, it assigns that associated cost to DestCost.
If no cost is assigned for the destination, the default cost is used. If you have specified no default cost for the server or LAN Area object, a value of -1 is assigned.