RE: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Printer control software
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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We use elderly (200MHz pentium 32MbRAM) machines running samba as CUPS print servers configured to hold all jobs until released via the CUPS web interface, which requires authentication by a member of the 'staff' group to release the jobs. It works great, is easy to administer and saves us a rain forests worth of paper each week. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll
We are hopeing to move our printers from NT to a CUPS based print server based on Phil`s system. (Thanks for the help on this Phil, its really appreciated.) It is looks like it is fairly easy to add limits like only one print job per user at any one time. How many times have you picked up three copies of something from the computer room floor as student clicked print four times picked up the first copy and left? There is some quotaing available, but I haven`t looked too deeply into that yet! Thanks Rob Keeling Network Manager Queen Elizabeth`s Grammar School Ashbourne ----- Original Message ----- From: "Phil Driscoll" <phil@dialsolutions.co.uk> To: "Grainge, Derek" <DGG@wellington-college.berks.sch.uk>; "Colin Davies" <colinidavies@yahoo.com>; <suse-linux-uk-schools@suse.com> Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2003 11:17 PM Subject: Re: [suse-linux-uk-schools] Printer control software We use elderly (200MHz pentium 32MbRAM) machines running samba as CUPS print servers configured to hold all jobs until released via the CUPS web interface, which requires authentication by a member of the 'staff' group to release the jobs. It works great, is easy to administer and saves us a rain forests worth of paper each week. Cheers -- Phil Driscoll -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: suse-linux-uk-schools-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands, e-mail: suse-linux-uk-schools-help@suse.com
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi, On Friday 17 January 2003 09:29, Rob Keeling wrote:
There is some quotaing available, but I haven`t looked too deeply into that yet!
<plug type="blatant">There's some quite interesting documentation (general cups, not KDE specific) on http://printing.kde.org, under the documentation </plug> (printing.kde.org webmaster) - -- Cheers, Chris Howells -- chris@chrishowells.co.uk, howells@kde.org Web: http://chrishowells.co.uk, PGP key: http://chrishowells.co.uk/pgp.txt KDE: http://www.koffice.org, http://printing.kde.org, http://usability.kde.org -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.0 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQE+KBdjF8Iu1zN5WiwRAkSXAJ4tqZaymbaUVtFzV8f3OnfcBxa5fACfRIPz ebbLT7QNaagi2ZONkfXtxYU= =14Po -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Everything you'll ever need on one web page from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts http://uk.my.yahoo.com
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: suse-linux-uk-schools-unsubscribe@suse.com For additional commands, e-mail: suse-linux-uk-schools-help@suse.com
-- ********************************************************************* *********** All mail sent and received may be examined to prevent transmission of unacceptable material. Wellington College does not accept responsibility for email contents. Problems to postmaster@wellington-college.berks.sch.uk. Website: http://www.wellington-college.berks.sch.uk ********************************************************************* ***********
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-- Best wishes, Derek
participants (5)
-
Chris Howells -
Derek Harding -
Grainge, Derek -
Phil Driscoll -
Rob Keeling