page-limit not working

John A. Sullivan III jsullivan at opensourcedevel.com
Fri Apr 9 05:13:14 PDT 2010


Hello, all.  Sorry to be such a pain to the list lately; I suppose I just don't think in CUPS and so misunderstand the documentation.  This is also our first major CUPS deployment and it is a fairly complicated, secure, multi-tenant environment.

Some of our clients have expensive plotters and would like to protect against someone accidentally sending 500 pages of full color print to a 36" wide color plotter.  We thought the answer would be to implement a short-lived quota - something like a quota time of 5 minutes and a page limit of 5 pages for the big plotters and 20 or 30 pages for the smaller ones.  Is this a reasonable approach?

We hit two problems.  We first tried to set the quota via lpadmin:
lpadmin -p jasiii-LocalPrinters -o job-quota-period=300 -o job-page-limit=5

This returned no error but also had no effect - no change to printers.conf.  If I changed it in my KDE print server manager console, the changes were reflected in printers.conf.  I don't know if this is because I have disabled the cgi scripts or because I have restricted access to the printer to specific IP addresses not including localhost127.0.0.1 (the lpadmin command was run on the print server).

However, even after restarting cupsd, the limit appears to have no effect.  I merrily printed a 16 page job.  I did check the page log and it showed 16 pages (it is not a raw print job).  I searched this forum for information and saw an old post that said CUPS allows one job to go over the quota.  That right there seems to foil our goal of preventing one accidental job.  Is that true?

In any event, I then sent three 16 page jobs to the printer in quick succession.  They all printed.  What am I doing wrong? Thanks - John

PS - for kicks I tried setting the KLimit to 1KB.  It still took all three 16 page jobs.  Here are some pertinent configuration and log details:

printers.conf excerpt:
<Printer jasiii-LocalPrinters>
Info Physical Desktop Printers
Location SimplicITy
DeviceURI cups-x2go:/
State Idle
StateTime 1270813430
Accepting Yes
Shared Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 300
PageLimit 3
KLimit 0
AllowUser <my user>
OpPolicy default
ErrorPolicy abort-job

page_log excerpt:
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 1 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 2 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 3 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 4 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 5 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 6 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 7 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 8 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 9 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 10 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 11 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 12 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 13 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 14 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 15 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 196 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:32 +0000] 16 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 1 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 2 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 3 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 4 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 5 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 6 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 7 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 8 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 9 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 10 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 11 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 12 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 13 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 14 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 15 1 - 172.x.y.1
jasiii-LocalPrinters jasiii 197 [09/Apr/2010:11:49:54 +0000] 16 1 - 172.x.y.1





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