From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Oct 1 23:58:34 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from isy.liu.se (isy.liu.se [130.236.48.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 914FF37B403 for ; Mon, 1 Oct 2001 23:58:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: from lagrange.isy.liu.se (lagrange.isy.liu.se [130.236.49.127]) by isy.liu.se (8.11.4/8.11.4) with ESMTP id f926wQc06440; Tue, 2 Oct 2001 08:58:26 +0200 (MET DST) Message-ID: X-Mailer: XFMail 1.5.0 on FreeBSD X-Priority: 3 (Normal) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <20011002054817.35730.qmail@web12004.mail.yahoo.com> Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2001 08:58:45 +0200 (CEST) From: Micke Josefsson To: =?iso-8859-1?q?Keith=20Spencer?= Subject: RE: Is Fbsd a good printer server???? Cc: fbsd Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 02-Oct-2001 Keith Spencer wrote: > Hi all, > My school has issues in its win2k network with > printing. > We can't easily or cost effectively track user/printer > info. Would like to allocate a budget per student and > if they go over charge them because they print waaaaay > toooo much. Sending us broke! > I am thinking of building a freebsd print server that > can do this stuff... > a) manage/own multiple HP jetdirect printers > to which 4050n and 2050n printers are attched No problem so far. But printer accounting seems to be difficult. If the printouts were in pure ACSII then there is support for accounting, but with postscript or PCL there is none as I know of. I have thought about running postscrips through a2ps to get the # pages that *ought* to have been printed by a print job, but there is no guarantee that the pages actually were. With the "input-filter mechanism" perhaps one can work something out? (the "if="-capability in /etc/printcap) > b) handle some kind of login or whatever from the > winNT/2k workstations to do print job accounting > c) mangae the stats of the printer acconting? > > Is this pie in the sky? > FreeBSD is very good at many things but is this too > much to ask? > Would I need samba to do a lot of this stuff. With samba you can force people to be logged in before trying to print. > If so can I use the domain controller usersnames > logged into the workstations etc etc. Complicated? > I am HOPING FreeBSD can help me. The librarian is > going gray with the printer/budget issues. I am actually not surprised. I have a few grey hairs too... > Regards > Keith Spencer > ---------------------------------- Michael Josefsson, MSEE mj@isy.liu.se This message was sent by XFMail running on FreeBSD 4.4-STABLE ---------------------------------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message