Billing system for CUPS

uli wehner mandraks at mandraks.net
Sun May 21 15:10:24 PDT 2006


Lorenzo,

another solution to your billing situation in a public area would be to use a solution at the actual printer....

That way it would be completely operating system, and print system independent, in fact it could be printer manufacture independent also.

we offer a solution specifically designed for Universities called campus card direct that does this.

release at the priner could be directly with the students campus cards. Proximity card, swipecard, swipecard with pin, anything goes.

the printer simply reports back to the camous card system how many pages were printed, (or copied, or scanned, or faxed....).

Only integration requirement is a keycounter connection and the actual hardware device.

I am quite sure that pretty much all printers and backend systems support this in some way or another.

FYI while i do work for Lanier Worldwide, Inc, this kind of approach should work equally well with many other printers...

regards

uli

> On Sun, May 21, 2006 at 11:44:33AM -0400, Lorenzo Thurman wrote:
> > I've asked this before, and found there was nothing suitable, so I
> > asking again on the chance that things have changed. A quick Google
> > search turned up nothing, so here goes:
> >
> > We use the Pharos Uniprint system to bill university students for
> > printing in the public labs. Uniprint can withdraw the fee from the
> > student's cash card. Is there anything like this yet for CUPS? There
> > was something before that would bill a student account via CUPS, but
> > that won't work for us. But as a subproject, it might be something
> > we might be interested in undertaking, if we can get some help.
>
> On the proprietary software side, I think PaperCut NG can probably
> do what you want (http://www.papercut.biz)
>
> There are several Free Software which could be more or less easily
> extended to do such things, because to my knowledge none of them
> support cash cards.
>
> If you're willing to give me sufficient details on how these cards
> work, I'd be glad to make such a system work with PyKota
> (http://www.librelogiciel.com/software/PyKota/action_Presentation)
> in a future release.
>
> bye
>
> Jerome Alet
>





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