[Samba] Printing. The REAL jobname. :)

[Matthew Western]

yers i found that.   and there is a thing to generate real page numbers.  i
want the real job name to get logged somewhere.  you know the one you see in
the windows print spool.  i thought about having a couple lines in the print
spool command in the [printers] section but couldn't figure it out.  %S is
the jobname so i thought i'd do a %S to a log file somehow and then do the
actual printing but couldn't figure out the lp command should be so put it
on the back burner.    we don't do billing from the logs, we have a separate
machine that does that so page numbers aren't a huge problem, but the actual
job name is what i'm after.

any ideas?

thanks
Matthew


-----Original Message-----
From: Freeman, Peter (ERHS) [mailto:Freeman.Peter at saugov.sa.gov.au]
Sent: Tuesday, June 03, 2003 11:04 AM
To: mwestern at sola.com.au
Cc: samba at lists.samba.org
Subject: RE: [Samba] Printing. The REAL jobname. :)


>Hi All,
>I've got a very nicely working samba server with cups as the
>backend.  i
>also have a colour printer on which I must do billing every month.
>
>i've done a test page or two and the username comes though to
>the colour
>printer which is good.  problem i had is the jobname in the logs is
>smbprn_xxxxxxxx_xx (numbers) which is the samba job name.  if
>joe bloggs
>complains and says he didn't print that many jobs, we've no
>way of saying
>here's what you printed with samba because it's not
>recognizable to them.
>sad.

The jobs are logged through cups in <cupslogdir>/page_log.

There are a few scripts around which generate some real numbers for
print accounting, nothing is 100% reliable as once the job is sent
(and therefore logged into page_log) cups assumes that it did print
and doesn't allow for things like paper jams and subsequent reprints etc.

One which I use is called printanalyzer, found at:
http://amaru.ti6.tu-harburg.de/portal/Members/ti6ntm/Projekte/Printanalyzer

If you setup cups to rotate logs every <n> billing days/months, then
you should end up with some nice stats on how many jobs were printed
to each printer (you may need to hack the script a bit to get it down
to jobs per user per printer level).