Controlling access to a printer by password

[nick r]

Hi

I run a school network and would like to limit access to the colour printer. Ideally, I would like cups to ask for a valid password before accepting a job on to the queue. It's not enough to limit using valid users/groups as I only want to let pupils print in colour when I think it is worthwhile on a job-by-job basis. Left to themselves they'd kill several trees and produce enough pollution to kill a small planet every day.

At the moment, I have to enable printer sharing as and when I want, but this relies on me remembering to switch it off again afterwards.

Relying on keeping the queue stopped and letting anyone queue jobs before manually removing the duds and duplicates would take too much time.

Is there an easier way of doing this? I wondered about .htaccess on the printer uri or something in printers.conf, but haven't discovered it so far.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Nick