<HTML> <!-- SECTION: Getting Started --> <HEAD> <TITLE>Printer Accounting Basics</TITLE> <LINK REL="STYLESHEET" TYPE="text/css" HREF="../cups-printable.css"> </HEAD> <BODY> <H1 CLASS="title">Printer Accounting Basics</H1> <P>CUPS supports a variety of printer accounting schemes. Aside from the built-in <A HREF="#QUOTAS">quota</A> and <A HREF="#PAGELOG">page logging</A> support, there are several third-party solutions that can be found on <A HREF="http://www.cups.org/">www.cups.org</A>.</P> <H2 CLASS="title"><A NAME="QUOTAS">Quota Support</A></H2> <P>CUPS supports page and size-based quotas for each printer. The quotas are tracked individually for each user, but a single set of limits applies to all users for a particular printer. For example, you can limit every user to 5 pages per day on an expensive printer, but you cannot limit every user except Johnny.</P> <P>The <CODE>job-k-limit</CODE>, <CODE>job-page-limit</CODE>, and <CODE>job-quota-period</CODE> options determine whether and how quotas are enforced for a printer. The <CODE>job-quota-period</CODE> option determines the time interval for quota tracking. The interval is expressed in seconds, so a day is 86,400, a week is 604,800, and a month is 2,592,000 seconds. The <CODE>job-k-limit</CODE> option specifies the job size limit in killobytes. The <CODE>job-page-limit</CODE> option specifies the number of pages limit.</P> <P>For quotas to be enforced, the period and at least one of the limits must be set to a non-zero value. The following options will enable weekly quotas with the given size and page count limits:</P> <PRE CLASS="command"> <KBD>/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p <I>printer</I> -o job-quota-period=604800 \ -o job-k-limit=1024 ENTER</KBD> <KBD>/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p <I>printer</I> -o job-quota-period=604800 \ -o job-page-limit=100 ENTER</KBD> </PRE> <P>Or, you can combine all three options on the same line.</P> <P>While there is no way to query the current quota state for a particular user, any application can request a list of jobs for a user and printer that can be used to easily determine that information.</P> <H2 CLASS="title"><A NAME="PAGELOG">Page Logging</A></H2> <P>CUPS logs every page that is printed on a system to the <VAR><A HREF="ref-page_log.html">page_log</A></VAR> file. Page logging is only available for drivers that provide page accounting information, typically all PostScript and CUPS raster devices. Raw queues and queues using third-party solutions such as Foomatic generally do not have useful page accounting information available.</P> </BODY> </HTML>