Printer accounting and cutoff from UNIX: is it possible?

[Juan Orlandini]

>>Students will ruin you if you give them an unlimited number of pages to
>>print on laser printers... All those christmas cards, sports results,
>>etc. Which university is able to tell each user of the system: you have
>>x kilobytes of disk space, y pages to print, and your account is
>>finished on day z. [ description of manual printer limits deleted ]
>>
>>Hey: we aren't living in the stone age anymore!! Doesn't anyone have a
>>PROGRAM for this?
>>
>>Alexander Verbraeck                  e-mail: winfave at dutrun.tudelft.nl

Here at Georgia Tech, the Office of Computer Services (OCS) gives each
student a permanent student account. They also give them a certain amount
of money (called banannas - for some reason unkown to me). All computers
under OCS management have accounting software that will subtract from the
allocated money based on what the user does. CPU time is more expensive
than mere storage which is about as expensive as printing. Different 
platforms have different cost attributes, but are equivalent in terms of
"real" work done. (They use a set of benchmarks to determine the ratios).
This neatly solves user abuse problems. The more they abuse the less they
have money to abuse with. Extreme cases of abuse are dealt with immediately.
Overall, there is a subvocal grumble by most of the students about OCS
policy being restrictive, but with limited resources, it is a quite
effective way.

Now, ICS on the other hand ... (just kidding OCS :-)

Juan


 Juan Orlandini                ///                                   ///
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