[cups.general] Prepaid printing service in school

[Brian Kroth]

It was already mentioned, but I'll give another +1 for tea4cups.  We do
accounting in our labs with that, pkpgcounter (from the same place) and
SNMP::NPAdmin - the latter being used to ask the printer how much it
actually printed before and after a job was completed since it's really
the best way to get accurate accounting.  We use pkpgcounter to estimate
the page counter before hand and cancel jobs for which people are
lacking quota and auto-hold jobs that look like some extreme number of
pages.  All the rest go through and deduct some weighted amount of pages
based on whether or not they're plotters, duplex, color, transparency,
etc.

Plotters obviously don't have a "pagecount" so we just estimate based on
linear foot printed.

tea4cups is pretty nice, we use it to do something other things like
check the printer's "health" over snmp before we send jobs to it as
well.

Cheers,
Brian

Ott Maaten <ott.maaten at gmail.com> 2010-08-23 03:29:
> Scenario:
> 
> 1. Student log in
> 2. According to the username the system polls the ID-code (necessary in Estonia) from the central database
> 3. According to the username the system polls the credit information from the central database
> 4. When user hits print button the job is sent to spooler (on hold) and the script counts page numbers and checks whether the person has enough credit.
> 5. If credit is OK the job is released to printer and information is sent to central database.
> 
> We have solution for points 1 2 3 and 5 but 4 is missing
> Can anyone help how to proceed?
> 
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