[Samba] Help with printer logs

Kurt Pfeifle kpfeifle at danka.de
Sat Apr 20 11:26:04 GMT 2002


Pavol Eisenberg wrote:
> Hello there
> 
> I have printer shared over the samba. What I need is to set up a loging for
> printer events. (Who,When....)
> 
> is it possible ?

Do you also need to tackle the task of "How many pages"?

Then you may want to look into CUPS (http://www.cups.org/).

If you send PostScript to the CUPS server (and ask it to process this
incoming format to fit the target printer), it will pass the CUPS-internal
(ghostscript-based) "pstops" and "pstoraster" filters. pstops is doing a
quite reliable logging of all the pages to the /var/log/cups/page_log
file. From there you will later be able to retrieve everything you need
(statistics, billing and accounting info...).

Just don't use the vendor-supplied printer-drivers on the Win-client
side, as this would generate the final data and necessitate CUPS to handle
the printjob as a "raw", therefor by-passing the pstops filter.

Use the Adobe PostScript driver on the client side, vamped up with one
of the suitable CUPS-PPDs. How to obtain Free Software PPDs, see also 
http://www.linuxprinting.org/ppd-doc.html. If you don't mind, you can also
use the commercial printer driver package from the CUPS developers
themselves, named "ESP PrintPro" (http://www.easysw.com/printpro/)'

Bye,
  Bye,
   Kurt








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