Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 12:08:39 +0100 (BST) From: Jan Grant <Jan.Grant@bristol.ac.uk> 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: <Pine.GSO.4.31.0110021159270.8265-100000@mail.ilrt.bris.ac.uk> 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 with > postscript or PCL there is none as I know of. Have a look at LPRng; while admitting that printer accounting is fighting an uphill battle (that you can never win), they do a pretty good job. The only real way to get an idea of the number of sheets of paper used is to query the printer's hardware page counter. You can do this with postscript in a lot of cases (lprng manages it with pjl too I think). The alternative for cheaper PCL printers is to use the right MIB and get page values with snmp. (Most printers won't let you turn off or ACL this, so you might as well use it. If you control your network you can ensure your printers are on a different subnet to the workstations they service, in many cases, so snmp isn't a complete waste of time). However, often the hardware PC may be unsynchronised with the job spooling mechanism of the printer; thus, you need (a) a method to fetch page counts (postscript / snmp) (b) lprng's algorithm for repeatedly using (a) to poll PC after a job has been sent until the value stabilises; alternatively, a printer that can signal EOJ properly. Then you can simply dump page counts before and after jobs to a log file, and let perl sort it all out; this works for accounting, but not pre-emptive accounting where everyone gets to print n hundred pages. Oh, and you'll also need to figure out how much a page costs. Difficult, since it depends upon colour (that is, the amount and distribution of toner on the page) as well as paper costs. You might as well charge per byte. At least those figures are readily measurable. I'd probably recommend cups or lprng for ease-of-use, although you can crowbar this kind of thing into straight lpr (or lp) if you wish. jan -- jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/ Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 RFC822 jan.grant@bris.ac.uk stty intr ^m To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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