[cups.general] CUPS statistics and page count

[Jerome Alet]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 11:38:41AM -0400, Joris Beld wrote:
> 
> We're running gentoo with the latest cups and i was wondering what 
> people use to get some statistics (essentially: which user prints 
> how much) out of cups? 
> 
> Do people still use home-brewn scripts, do they use pykota or is 
> there something simpler/easier? 

It depends on your exact needs, and also on the printer drivers you
use.

If you only use PostScript drivers and don't print in raw mode, 
then CUPS' page_log file may contain sufficient informations 
for you without needing to install additional software.

You can parse page_log with phpPrintAnalyzer, which presents
these datas in a graphical and web-enabled way.

If you need something more customizeable and your printers
support SNMP, you can use accsmp. Or you could use your
own backend wrapper, or Tea4CUPS, along with some
calls to snmpget and/or pkpgcounter, and log the datas
the way you want.

If you want some intermediate stuff you could use JASmine,
which internally uses pkpgcounter and logs history to
MySQL, but can't do print quotas for now.

If you are not afraid of somewhat complex stuff, you could
try PyKota, which can be configured to talk in real time
(or near real-time) with phpPrintAnalyzer if you want, and
can enforce quotas in different manners.

And of course all the software listed above are Free Software,
so you can take parts of them, combine them in another way,
and build your own solution.

NB : there are links to all the software above on www.cups.org

Finally, if you prefer proprietary software there's PaperCut NG,
or X2 Print Accounting. Find them with your favorite search
engine.

bye

Jerome Alet