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

lprng/ifhp and printers with hardware pagecounters

[elvisior]

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).

CUPS

[Fellgus]

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 :)

See http://printing.kde.org for a tutorial

[chowells]

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

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.