Need to get IP address of computer sending job

Gary Carroll garycarroll at nospamcharter.net
Sat Oct 20 14:01:01 PDT 2007


OS = Mac OS 10.4
I have set up a shared print queue that writes incoming jobs to a folder 
as PDF. I would like record about each job with information concerning 
the username, time sent (not always the same as time processed into 
PDF!), IP/MAC address of the system sending the data, and formatting 
requests from the original PostScript such as staple, duplex/simplex, 
etc. 
I believe can get the formatting requests by examining the incoming 
PostScript with a CUPS prefilter before it is converted to PDF. 
Since all users will be on the LAN I should in theory be able to get 
their MAC address by issuing an ³arp IP-address² shell command. However, 
I would need to know their IP address to do so. I don't know if this is 
visible to CUPS.

Do I have to sniff packets to get this data? If so, does it seem 
reasonable to have a tshark process started with a filter that writes 
only the relevant portions of incoming print jobs to a file which can be 
read via the prefilter to get the needed data?

Does someone have a better suggestion?




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