Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 10:04:55 +0200 (CEST) From: Konrad Heuer <kheuer@gwdu60.gwdg.de> To: Micke Josefsson <mj@isy.liu.se> Cc: =?iso-8859-1?q?Keith=20Spencer?= <bsd2000au@yahoo.com.au>, fbsd <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: Is Fbsd a good printer server???? Message-ID: <20011002095342.S51649-100000@gwdu60.gwdg.de> In-Reply-To: <XFMail.20011002085845.mj@isy.liu.se>
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On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Micke Josefsson wrote: > On 02-Oct-2001 Keith Spencer wrote: > > Hi all, > > My school has issues in its win2k network with > > printing. > > We can't easily or cost effectively track user/printer > > info. Would like to allocate a budget per student and > > if they go over charge them because they print waaaaay > > toooo much. Sending us broke! > > I am thinking of building a freebsd print server that > > can do this stuff... > > a) manage/own multiple HP jetdirect printers > > to which 4050n and 2050n printers are attched > > No problem so far. But printer accounting seems to be difficult. If the > printouts were in pure ACSII then there is support for accounting, but wi= th > postscript or PCL there is none as I know of. I have thought about runnin= g > postscrips through a2ps to get the # pages that *ought* to have been prin= ted by > a print job, but there is no guarantee that the pages actually were. > > With the "input-filter mechanism" perhaps one can work something out? > (the "if=3D"-capability in /etc/printcap) In the ports collection there is a utility called rprint (written by myself :-) ) which can be used within an input filter to query the page counter of postscript printers. You may want to try it to make a start. Furthermore, one can count pages within PostScript print jobs by using Ghostscript. Budgets for printing are in use in our computer center, too; I've written a small client-server database application for that purpose. But using the postcript language for print jobs is essential here. I may send you all the stuff within a tar file; but with the exception of rprint documentation lacks. I plan to make more the code available by the ports collection if accepted, but need to finf the time to do so. Keith, please fell free to contact me if you are interested. Konrad Heuer Personal Bookmarks: Gesellschaft f=FCr wissenschaftliche Datenverarbeitung mbH G=D6ttingen http://www.freebsd.org Am Fa=DFberg, D-37077 G=D6ttingen http://www.daemonnews.o= rg Deutschland (Germany) kheuer@gwdu60.gwdg.de To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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