Printer Quotas in Linux?

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?"

Comments

PaperCut for linux

[cdance]

I'm the developer of PaperCut , a Windows print charging system. I'm about 3/4 the way through developing a Samba/Linux version (done in my spare time). I'm aiming for an initial release in March. The applications has a number of components; a page count parser written in C, an application server and webadmin interface in Python, and it all sit's on PostgreSQL. It simply substitutes the lp command in smb.conf . I haven't yet decided on a licence however it'll most likely be GPL. Keep an eye on the website. Windows charging systems are quite expensive. This is due to the high development costs associated with maintaining compatibility with the every changing Win print drivers. You will however find that the systems will usually pay for themselves very quickly (amazing how much students will print if it's for free!). I'm hoping a community supported page count parser will ensure a viable Linux version. Chris

Washington Univesity

[KurdtX]

I think that's what we used. You'd have to talk to the person in charge of the lab (go to www.cec.wustl.edu/news) and click on that email link - she's an administrator (as in she shuffles paperwork), but she's in charge and can point you to who you need to talk to. I think we use lpquota (Wash U doesn't enforce the limits - see below) and we run it off UNIX, but that's as much as I know.

You also might want to be sure that this is a good idea, like I said, we run lpquota, but don't enforce it 'cause it's not worth the time to track down and add a $.50 charge to someone's transcript, have them raise hell 'cause they didn't know there was a printer limit, and then ultimately get someone to remove it. Not to mention then getting your ass chewed after this happens enough times.

If you actually want to affect the people who print out large numbers of pages, screen out any print jobs larger than 50 pages (not file size) - it's amazing how many people view something a few pagedowns into a really long (poorly segmented) webpage, and then click pring, expecting only that page to show up, and then not realize that it comes out as 104 pages take the 1 they want and throw the rest away (ignoring the bright blue recycle bin). If people complain to your lab admins or whoever, it's an excellent chance to teach them the wonders of how to choose exactly which pages (ie, pages 3-4) they actually want.