-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday, 2010-02-16 at 15:47 +0100, Johannes Meixner wrote:
Hello,
On Feb 12 22:12 Carlos E. R. wrote (shortened):
... I use a laser color printer (HP cp1515n) ... Another interesting detail is that the page counter on the printer counts down to zero and stays there, so that the several hundred pages I printed above the limit are not counted. So I wonder if "something" could be attached to cups and do a real count of printed pages
There is by default CUPS' software accounting which stores its best-effort/best-guess results into /var/log/cups/page_log For its file format see http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.3/ref-page_log.html
Ah! Well, I can get a roughly accurate page count from there, by storing somewhere when I change cartridges. Quite rough, I'd have to take into acount two computers and several test/work partitions...
But software accounting cannot be really reliable, e.g. see http://otrs.librelogiciel.com/otrs/public.pl?Action=&ID=24
I understand that it is not easy to be accurate, I wanted an approximation. Anyway, my printer does not do double sided printing. It is a feature I'd like to have, but costs money. On largish jobs, I print the odd sides, put the paper back in, then the even sides.
In particular by printing in "raw" mode via something like cat printer_specific_data | lp -d queue_name -o raw any user can bypass all CUPS filtering and therefore also no software accounting program can be run in "raw" mode.
Not my case, but yes, one problem more.
Therefore for "a real count of printed pages" you need hardware accounting which is - as far as I know - only possible via SNMP for business network printers which maintain an internal reliably working page counter.
I have not investigated that. Anyway, my printer (if connected via network) has a web page that counts how many pages are printed by each cartridge. Or rather, how many pages remain - the problem is that when it gets to zero it does not keep counting the excess, so that next time you can not guess how long it should last.
But pages != sheets of paper so that when printing in duplex mode the counted number of pages is about two times the number of sheets of paper, see http://otrs.librelogiciel.com/otrs/public.pl?Action=&ID=32
More problems :-)
Furthermore even an internal reliably working page counter counts all pages but not "only pages with toner on it", see http://forums13.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1266330795845+28353475&threadId=347346
And more
For more details you may have a look at http://www.pykota.com/
Ah! And I see you made an rpm of it for 11.0 at least. I might try it, dunno, perhaps it is excesive. - -- Cheers, Carlos E. R. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2.0.9 (GNU/Linux) iEYEARECAAYFAkt7CNMACgkQtTMYHG2NR9WXiwCfbcwnPMj/YN9qzEz55x/m4s+5 2eYAnj7MKZasfImA+P2lyjJzs1QewFy2 =beOb -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org