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Printer Quotas in Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the toner-doesn't-grown-on-trees-ya-know dept.

borgquite asks: "At the school that I work for students waste a lot of paper and toner because they print without thinking. I've been looking at printer quota / charging software, but unfortunately I can't seem to find any for Linux, and the Windows based software is all priced far too high. What I need to do is to say that students can print a certain amount per day/week/month/year, and provide a system where they can pay to increase their quota. I've looked for Linux / BSD based solutions, but all I could find is lots of references to a tool called lpquota, but no information on how I can obtain and implement this on my network. Does anyone know of such a system?"

4 of 27 comments (clear)

  1. lprng/ifhp and printers with hardware pagecounters by elvisior · · Score: 3, Informative

    lprng/ifhp and printers with hardware pagecounters enable this functionality. We have implemented this for approximately 50 great lexmark laser printers across 5 campuses (hint.. look at the achk and af entries that you can put in to an lprng printcap file).

    I strongly recommend reading lprng doco regarding pagecounting. And then don't follow our example and use software based counting instead (which we may test when we get time.. I think it is also much easier to implement as good hardware page counters in printers are rare these days).

  2. CUPS by Fellgus · · Score: 3, Informative

    CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) has support for simple quotaing. You can limit number of pages per user per time interval (e.g. month) and so forth. You cannot however set quotas per user individually or per user group. THere is, however a page_log which logs who has print how many pages. This can be used to disable access to the printing server for those who print to much to your likings :)

    --

    -larsch

  3. Re:no need for hardware pagecounters. by Zurk · · Score: 2, Informative

    you can do it all in software. i implemented a printbill (http://freshmeat.net/projects/printbill/) based system with debian print servers, postgresql for the database and printbill to handle the rest. printbill can also be obtained with apt-get install printbill and it gives stuff like per page toner accounting, coverage accounting and stuff for inkjet printers as well as lasers. very useful.

  4. See http://printing.kde.org for a tutorial by chowells · · Score: 3, Informative

    A tutorial can be found at http://printing.kde.org/documentation/tutorials/qu otas.phtml.