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Print Quotas Under NT?
AmiOtaku asks: "I am a
student lab coordinator for Southwest Texas State University and I
was wondering if anyone could help me. I'm looking for a way to
limiting printing in several of my labs. Print
Quota Manager and Print
Manager Plus do not suit our needs. Both fail to obtain a list
of users from our NT domain. Our server is not the primary domain
controller for the campus, just the domain controller for our domain
which has a trust relationship with the main domain for campus, but
is not trusted, which is why both seem to fail in getting a list of
user names. Anyway, if I could find a way to simply limit each print
job to under X amount of pages, that would be a great help. Keeping a
log of users and enforcing quotas would be nice but is really optional.
Any ideas?" Before anyone starts delving into OS advocacy, I think
it poignant to note that we did this same
question for Linux, just
last week.
I have implimented Pcounter a 2 Universities, here in Oz, and works very, very well.
I started with ver 2 about 7 years ago, and we sent every printjob that counted wrong back to Andy, and he gradually iorned out all the holes that students tried to exploit to get free counting, until, its now almost builtproof.
go look at www.pcounter.com
Dave...
It's funny. This is the 2nd Windows related print quota question on Slashdot in the last week! I developed the Windows print charging application PaperCut. I initial put PaperCut together in my final year at Uni as I saw a need for a product that worked. I now do full time Linux/Unix development but keep PaperCut dev going at night and in my somewhat limited spare time. It supports trusted domains as you have described and I (or my fellow developers) would be happy to help you out with any installation technical questions. Also seeing that your a fellow Slashdot reader, I'd be happy to offer you a free copy (free as in fee free. The Open Source Linux version is coming soon ;-) See my post on the related topic last week. ). ~Chris
Yes. Print charging and quote must be managed by 3rd party apps. I don't know if MS plan on introducing it into their OS. Probably not for a while. The problem is that the older Window 9X clients transfer their print jobs to the print server without page count information, so the raw binary printer data must be parsed to extract the page count. Microsoft have control over the file system format, so introducing quote is expected. They don't have control over printer languages and their drivers so implementing a quote solution is a whole different ball game.