The school I was at had PCounter on a Novell server. It also miscounted but we discovered it was because there was more than one queue to a physical printer and the config needed changing. The licence costs were quite considerable over our server base. CUPS was the answer I eventually adopted but since then, having left the school, I'm sure I've seen some sort of print accounting/quota for Linux but I can't recall it!
My school has it working under NT; and I have to say I am not really all that impressed. It has miscounted costs, and we have had to force it to recount pages to rectify this. It will report student's balances and you can provide them with credit, and optionally refuse to print when the system goes in the red. You can bill pupils or parents later.
My feeling is that billing later misses the point: which is to prevent little gremlins from wasting printouts in the first place.
As far as credit is concerned, if you decide to prevent printing when the balance hits zero, you will get queues of kids whinging about their balances - and this will impose a considerable burden on the small number (one?) of people who are asked to administer the system: a bottleneck.
Pcounter's website mentions a machine you can install near a printer. This allows pupils who are over-limit to identify jobs and put money in to pay for them. The machine itself isn't cheap and I think it's windows only. There must be better than this? What do others have to say?
-----Original Message----- From: Colin Davies [mailto:colinidavies@yahoo.com] Sent: 16 January 2003 17:52 To: suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com Subject: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Printer control software
I found out about a print control program called Pcounter at Bett. Although it is intended for NT (excuse my language)It does work on Linux with samba running. However getting it to work without using an extra computer with NT is causing problems. Our current bill for printing consumables is approaching £10K and this seems a promising solution to the multiple printing.
Has anyone got Pcounter or any other print control software working under Linux?
Colin Davies Meadows Community School Chesterfield
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