An open source print management system that works
Louis W. Canaiy, Mark R. Ritschard · 2004
At Colorado State University, the engineering computing labs were running up huge printing costs due to excessive printing. We looked into several commercial print quota solutions that were quite pricey and limited in capability. We wanted something cheap (who doesn't?) and available across several computing platforms. The open source option we settled on consists of a print daemon (LPRng), Samba, a custom accounting script written in Perl, MySQL, Sendmail, and the print filter IFHP. In addition to our command-line administration utilities, we've developed a web-based administration system that uses Apache and PHP as a scripting language. The web-based system greatly simplifies our administration needs. Our system currently runs on the Linux platform, but could conceivably run on any Unix or Unix-like flavor. Our conglomeration of code bases satisfies all our requirements, and we have realized a large decrease in costs, as well as an associated increase in intelligent printing practices on the part of users. In this paper, we will outline the components of the PQuota system, how they interact, and their role in fulfilling our objectives of cost effectiveness, cross platform availability and ease of use for both administrators and users as well as low user impact.