Track number of pages users print in a month

[bse]

> > I need to know if anyone knows of a good script to run once a month via cron that will out put a list of users and how many pages they print? I have 5 printers, and a few hundred users. We are trying to watch for people printing excessive amounts, but not with a user quota because sometimes a professor will need to print a large number of pages before class, and need to let them do that while see who is, so if an undergrad or grad student prints way to much we can find out what they were printing and decide what to do from there.
> >
> > Thanks for any and all help
>
> I forgot to mention that I tried PrintAnalyzer (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/printanalyze/) It always gave me an error for every print job in the log file, it's written in perl, and I don't know perl so I could't try to fix it, so if anyone can fix it, i think it has to do with a recent update to cups that change the log file format, please let me know

I will try to explain my opinion better.

As I understand, you want something to keep track of print jobs, Who, when, how much, where and so on, but you prefer to not enforce quota.

I still recommend you to try PyKota. I have used it for many years without any problem.

You can choose to give a user the ability to print any number of pages, or you can enforce a quota. It will keep track of all print jobs anyway.

You do not have to send invoices.

You can anytime get at report of pages printed for any user(s) on any printer(s)

It is zero administration. Really.
Add a printer in Cups, and it will be added in PyKota automagically. The same with users. Last week all our students (19000) got their quota updated. This week 3000 students entered the university, I dont have to do anything.
The users make up to 15000 print jobs per day on 500 printers (anything from HP LJet5 via Xerox/Ricoh MFP to 1 meter wide roll feed), 20 millions of pages printed per year. It just works.
The only problem we have is braindead printers (I have 3 Xerox DocuColor that is hopeless), but the situation would be even worse without PyKota. Now I get good logs, and can make informed decisions.

Page counting is done either by builtin software (parsing print file), builtin hardware (snmp or pjl) or by scripts implementing you own methods.
Latest patches (on its way in) implements keeping track of A3/A4, color/black, even mixed in the same job.

PyKota uses the usernames that are passed from Cups. I mentioned Kerberos in my earlier message because that is what we are using, and it gives good security and no administration. You can use Basic authentication (uname + passwd) if You want. Or none at all if you trust the users and only want a log of print jobs.

//Bse