Re: [Gnome-print] Re: [Gimp-print-devel] An introduction to gnome-print (fwd)

[Mike Porter <mike UDel Edu>]

On Sat, 3 Jun 2000, Michael Sweet wrote:

> Miguel de Icaza wrote:
> > ...
> > You have still not proved that accounting is going to be an issue;
> 
> Ask any corporation if they keep track of printer use.  Ask any
> college.  Ask any government agency.  Ask any printing company.
> 
> Accounting isn't usually a big deal for cheap prints from B&W lasers,
> but as soon as you have a large group of people printing to an
> expensive printer (say a typical inkjet printer), the bean counters
> will want to know who is using up the supplies so they can charge
> them for it.
> 
> > You need printer support for accurrate quotas and accurrate
> > accounting.  Any other approach is just a failed attempt at feeling
> > cozy.
> 
> So we should just give up trying and say it can't be done?!?
> 
> Reasonably accurate accounting can be done with PS files; PCL and
> ESC/P are harder but can also can be monitored to keep track of the
> number of prints.  This doesn't prevent malicious users from sending
> custom code that will "fool" the accounting system, but the
> accounting system is going to at least log 1 page as printed in a
> file, and if the sysadm sees 1 page is took an hour to print and
> all of a sudden s/he has to replace the printer supplies, they'll
> get the offender pretty quickly.

You can't mention colleges and 'fooling' together in the same
message.  Accounting in Universities must be either dead-on
accurate, or someone (lots of someones...many many someones) will
fool it.  Tracking down the people doing this just isn't an
option.  Site people wouldn't have access to central system
accounting records, and systems people don't have time to find out
who's been printing a bit too much paper.

We still log page level accounting on PostScript printers by
querying the start and end pages, but any other software driven
page accounting isn't worth the trouble (well, we do it as sort of
an FYI, but the number is not used in accounting).

Different story on the admin mainframe.  Professional staff don't
waste their time trying to fool the mainframe.

Mike