[cups.general] Beginner's problem with authentication policyin 1.3.0

[Jerome Alet]

On Fri, Nov 23, 2007 at 08:37:53AM -0800, John A. Murdie wrote:
> 
> The one MAJOR problem I have is that the username that CUPS takes, 
> of course, is that of the submitting user on the laptop, which may 
> be different from the authenticated organisational username - and 
> the laptop username appears on job headers and also gets to printer 
> page accounting systems such as PyKota. This is of course bad, bad, 
> bad; one can charge one's printing to others merely by creating 
> oneself an account in any name one likes on one's laptop. Here this 
> would be monetary theft. 

You can workaround this problem with PyKota already through the 
'overwrite_jobticket' directive. 

This directive allows you to launch any command of your choice to 
overwrite (or not) the job's username and optional billing code or 
to reject the job if needed. PyKota recommends you use pknotify + a 
PyKotIcon app on the remote clients, but where this is not 
practical, like in your case, any shell script which can map the 
client's hostname or IP address to an username can be used easily. 
NB : the username with which you'll overwrite the job ticket's one 
only need to exist in PyKota's database, but it doesn't need to 
exist on the system if you don't want to/need to. 

See pykota/conf/pykota.conf.sample for details on what your script
needs to do to be used as a way to overwrite a job's ticket.

bye

Jerome Alet