Straight-forward Print Quota System for *nix?
saihung writes: "I pitched a Linux-based file and print queue server to a department at a local university, and they accepted with one caveat: that I also implement print quotas and accounting. The accounting isn't really a big deal, but I've looked high and low and found nothing even approaching comprehensive quota support. Does anyone know of a print quota system for *nix that doesn't amount to "here's a few perl scripts that don't work"?" There are several printing systems under development, but I don't have any idea which would be the easiest to implement a print quota system. Anyone?
in my time we used to use lpr to do everything. .. no fancy software and roll their own accounting/quota system using shell scripts.
/ printer_quota
real men use pure unix tools
If you really must have a howto on implementation details checks this site out : http://www.sct.gu.edu.au/~anthony/info/postscript
We use CUPS (The Common Unix Printing System) and find it very good. It seems they added quota support in 1.1.5, but I can't find any docs. It may be worth investigating this.
The Univ. of Bonn CS Dept. has a very nice
d e. html
homegrown network print accounting/quota system
written by Walter Steiner that handles different
cost on different printers, printing budgets,
accounting to different cost groups etc.
There is a german description on
http://www.informatik.uni-bonn.de/dv/pac/wspac-
I suggest you contact pacadm@iai.uni-bonn.de and
ask if they'll let you have it.
--Andreas
"in my time" must have been the '70s or early '80s. Anything that happend in the late '80s or '90s is "back in the day."
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.