[Wylug-help] print quota

[Steve King]

Hi

Anyone know how to go about setting up a printer quota system?

Here's the situation:

It's in a school with a number of different network printers. All the
printers are controlled by Cups on a linux box.  The users print to it
from Windows (but linux soon!), and depending on where they are sat get
to see a diferent list of printers.  Each student has their own
username.  Soon the users will be able to print from linux boxes too,
but I guess this is irrelevant as all the printing goes through the one
server.  The linux machines are old crappy machines made into thin
clients, it's going to be interesting converting the students into linux
users :-) There will still be windows machines mind, but to be fair
XPpro really isn't causing me /too/ many problems so far! (gah, don't
flame me!)  Things like the way it deals with adding scanners is amazing
- plug in the supported scanner (all that the school has are), wait a
sec or two, press the scan button on the scanner AND THAT'S IT!  Anyway,
back to printing...

I'd like to implement a system similar to that at the SoC at Leeds Uni,
whereby each user gets x pages per week to print, able to "store" up to
y pages.  I think at uni we got 20 pages/week, but could have up to 100
available to us if we didn't print for 5 weeks.  I think if you used up
all of your quota you could beg support to let you have more printouts
(I never needed more mind, but I think you could beg!)

We have 2 types of printers - inkjets and lasers. If possible
we'd like to separate this out so that the users have maybe 20 laser
sheets a week but only 3 inkjet sheets (numbers plucked from nowhere,
but that's not really important). This is mainly due to the cost/page
difference in the two sorts of printers, but also the huge speed
increase that let the kyoceras print about 10 pages in the time it takes
teh inkjets to do one!

Having googled about this I see many questions, but not many answers.
The pages I see that look interesting are all similar to this one:

http://www.librelogiciel.com/software/PyKota/action_Presentation

If anyone could point some real life experience (/me looks at Mark and
JJ :-) ) about how this works in practice I'm sure that I'd be able to
stretch to a pint or two for that person next time I make it to Wylug!

We are wanting to put a quota on because the users seem to have a habit
of printing stuff out and not collecting it, and this is a vain attempt
to stop that happening! (ok ok, so I've seen the huge piles of paper in
by the SoC printers!).

Tehre's no urgent rush for this, as the students and staff are still in
awe at working computers and printers that actually print!  But it is
something that I'd like to get set up in teh nearish future.

Cheers, and sorry for the longish mail and the praise of XP,

Steve