Printer accounting and cutoff from UNIX: is it possible?

[Vick Khera]

In article <1159 at dutrun.UUCP> winfave at dutrun.UUCP (A.Verbraeck) writes:
>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

Academic Computing here at Duke implemented such a system. The students pay
up front for the number of pages they want.  The printing software tells
the LaserWriter how many pages it is allowed to print, sends the print job,
then asks the printer how many pages it actually printed.  This value is
subtracted from the account's remaining pages.  All of this is automatic.
This software runs on SunOS 4, by the way.

I don't know who to contact about this, I just know they have implemented
it. I am not affiliated with them in any way, so don't ask me for it.

								v.
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Vick Khera                              Department of Computer Science
ARPA:   khera at cs.duke.edu               Duke University
UUCP:   ..!{mcnc,decvax}!duke!khera     Durham, NC 27706