how to restrict network printouts

[Gavin McCullagh]

Hi,

On Thu, 06 Sep 2007, Serdar Dolphin wrote:

> I work at elementary school and we proudly use edubuntu in labs. my
> question is HOW to restrict users to printouts?
> 
> lets say each user will have 100 pages quota for a month or period of
> time.  since they are in limit they cant print more...

The first thing you need to do is pick your model, some people 

 - use absolute monthly quotas 
 - allow students to print to a queue but require a teacher to allow each
   print job -- cups can do this out of the box.
 - some other variant.

I have to admit I've never used quotas, though I have had print jobs queued
for approval.  

Queueing print jobs for approval can be done by adding this line:

	Option job-hold-until indefinite

to the stanza for a given printer in /etc/cups/printers.conf.  You then
restart cups (system->administration->services) and jobs should start
queuing.  To approve jobs, someone in the cupsys group must login to the
cups webpage on the server

	http://localhost:631 

and look under "jobs".

This page seems to describe a simple way to do quotas:

	http://linux.unimelb.edu.au/server/course/fc3/cups.html

although if you need more, the PyKota quota add-on for CUPS provides more
powerful quota systems for CUPS.

	http://www.pykota.com/
	http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Printing/PyKota-Print-Quota-System-5421.shtml

The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) documentation is here:

	http://www.cups.org/documentation.php

To get the most out of CUPS you may need to be willing to carefully edit
config files in /etc/cups/ as some of the graphical configuration tools
don't support all of the features.

Gavin