Global print quota for guest/nobody?

[John]

Thanks for the reply. Having the quest accounts be distinguished by hostname/ip/mac address would work great. As far as my print restrictions/quota is concerned, the time restraint is in place only because CUPS requires a time restraint. My goal is to limit any 1 print job to say 10-15 pages - the lab printer is only meant to print labs and reports (usually 15 pages or less). So the page restriction is needed only to discourage printing huge jobs (obviously not school related), forcing students to break up their print job in increments if the job is larger than 10-15 pages. So I don't know how to directly answer your question about the time restraint needed Jerome, but hopefully this information answers the question for you. If using Pykota is relatively easy and can fullfill these requirements of mine, I'll gladly purchase and use it.

-John











> On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 10:58:51AM -0800, John wrote:
> > I have made a print server using Ubuntu 7.10 server, its also a simple file server. I did not make a domain controller, my main objective is to create a print server that restricts people from printing massive amounts of pages. My original post can be found here:
> >
> > http://www.cups.org/newsgroups.php?s15183+gcups.general+v15183+T0
> >
> > My question/problem boils down to;
> > -Can a guest/nobody account (no authentication used) have a print
> > restriction placed on them? I was trying to impose 10 pages per
> > minute.
> > -If so, will individual computers be considered unique? For
> > example if my neighbor and I are behind the same print server
> > printing to the same printer, and my neighbor prints 10 pages, will
> > I have to wait 1 minute to print?
>
> To the best of my knowledge, the only print quota software which
> allows you to do this (differentiate identical usernames based on
> hostname) easily is PyKota (http://www.pykota.com).
>
> With it you'll be able (with a 3 lines shell script, including the
> shebang line) to replace the username at print time, automatically.
>
> For example if you want to differentiate between client hosts,
> you'll replace the user's name (e.g. guest) with the concatenation
> of user's name and client hostname (e.g. host1.example.com), at printing time,
> to record all accounting as, for example : 'guest.host1.example.com'
>
> With exactly the same method, you could do limit printing based on
> client's hostname only, or whatever information you want, the only
> limit is your imagination and you ability to use the 'echo' shell
> command...
>
> Of course this can be done for some printers / some usernames / some
> hostnames only.
>
> To reset the page counts every minute, you've got several solutions
> as well, depending on if you want to do this at the very same time
> for all users (in this case setup a crontab), or really 1 minute after
> the last printed job, for each user (which is very different). In the
> latter case, you'll have to change a directive in PyKota's configuration
> file to automate the reset of the page counter one minute after the
> job has been printed.
>
> Beware with these resets : you may put some heavy load on
> your database backend if you've got lots of users and the time
> between two resets is short.
>
> hth
>
> Jerome Alet
>