Very Computer

I'm currently using a 25MHz 486 with 8mb ram as a print server, for an
HP LaserJet 6L. It's running Samba/CUPS on Debian Woody, and it works
fairly well: printing is possible from Mac OSX and another Debian box
via ipp, and from Win2k with Samba. However, since it's such a slow
beast, all the machines are set up to send raw data (PCL I think) to the
server rather than sending Postscript and letting the print server
convert into PCL with ghostscript.

This means that I can do no page accounting: the /var/cups/page_log file
  shows that CUPS thinks that every job is one page long. Is there any
package that give me accurate page accounting? Essentially I think I
want to get the print server to dissect the PCL to figure out how many
pages are being printed. An alternative approach would be to query the
printer to see how many pages are being printed.

I'm happy to ditch CUPS if that would help...

TIA,
Rupert

--
Real email address:
rupert underscore levene at yahoo dot co dot uk

I'm currently using a 25MHz 486 with 8mb ram as a print server, for an
HP LaserJet 6L. It's running Samba/CUPS on Debian Woody, and it works
fairly well: printing is possible from Mac OSX and another Debian box
via ipp, and from Win2k with Samba. However, since it's such a slow
beast, all the machines are set up to send raw data (PCL I think) to the
server rather than sending Postscript and letting the print server
convert into PCL with ghostscript.

This means that I can do no page accounting: the /var/cups/page_log file
  shows that CUPS thinks that every job is one page long. Is there any
package that give me accurate page accounting? Essentially I think I
want to get the print server to dissect the PCL to figure out how many
pages are being printed. An alternative approach would be to query the
printer to see how many pages are being printed.

I'm happy to ditch CUPS if that would help...

TIA,
Rupert

--
Real email address:
rupert underscore levene at yahoo dot co dot uk

The printer does. If the printer is equipped with a network card she
could tell you every single job from which ip address come, how many
pages and so on.

See the documentation of your printer.

AFAIK, next versions of HP color printer will also be able to tell you
how much toner/ink for every single print.

Davide

Thanks for that hint... unfortunately the printer is a fairly old HP
LaserJet6, and has no network card. That's why I need a print server to
hook it up to the network.

Quote:

> See the documentation of your printer.

It's a second-hand HPLJ6 at that, so I have no paper docs anyway. The
closest thing I can find to what you describe is npadmin, but this seems
to require that the printer itself is networked. My printer is just
attached to the parallel port of the print server. Can I query the
printer through the parallel port?

If this isn't possible, I'd still welcome suggestions for how to dissect
the PCL that arrives at the print server to find out how many pages will
be printed.

Rupert
--
Real email address:
rupert underscore levene at yahoo dot co dot uk

No, but then you can just run accounting on your printer server and
see who is sending the packets to the printer...

BTW, in the last job I (and a collegue of mine) developed a java
application that does exactly that. Now (AFAIK) the project have been
killed, but I still have the sources... maybe you can have a look at
it and put on your own system.

If you want to go this way, send me a mail (davideATicat1.knoware.nl)

Davide