Querying Printers

[Simo Sorce]

On Mon, 4 Dec 2000, Keith Lynn wrote:

> Hello everyone,
>      I have a question that I hope some of you can help me with. I have
> several laboratories that I maintain. Each one has its own printer. The
> machines are NT 4.0 clients that are served by Samba running on a
> Linux server (RedHat 6.0/6.2). The printer in each laboratory is a Samba
> share on the server for that laboratory. I need to find a way to
> establish an accounting of how many pages each user is printing. I'm aware
> that simply obtaining a page count won't give an accurate measure because
> the printer is Postscript(HP 4000N and QMS 1725). But I've read a few
> messages that indicated that someone might have a script that could get an
> accurate count by using a filter. I've also read some suggestions about
> querying the printer to get an accurate count. Does anyone have experience
> in doing these things or can you point me to where I might find some
> sample scripts? Thanks.
>
I made a filter with a file database for user quotas, but this involved
the use of postscript only printfiles (and possibly generated by Adobe
Postscript drivers because others tend to forget the Pages count field in
the postscript file, anyway when this miss a 'page' command is issued to
retrieve the number of pages).

Printing quality is obviously dependent on postscript driver quality!

It worked fine for me and is completely bash scripts based, if you're
interested I may post something.

-- 
Simo Sorce - Integrazione Sistemi Unix/Windows - Politecnico di Milano
E-mail: simo.sorce at polimi.it
Tel.int: 02 2399 2425 - Fax.int. 02 2399 2451
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Be happy, use Linux!