doc/help/accounting.html

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   4         <TITLE>Printer Accounting Basics</TITLE>
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   9 <H1 CLASS="title">Printer Accounting Basics</H1>
  10
  11 <P>CUPS supports a variety of printer accounting schemes. Aside from the
  12 built-in <A HREF="#QUOTAS">quota</A> and <A HREF="#PAGELOG">page logging</A>
  13 support, there are several third-party solutions that can be found on
  14 <A HREF="http://www.cups.org/">www.cups.org</A>.</P>
  15
  16
  17 <H2 CLASS="title"><A NAME="QUOTAS">Quota Support</A></H2>
  18
  19 <P>CUPS supports page and size-based quotas for each printer.
  20 The quotas are tracked individually for each user, but a single set of
  21 limits applies to all users for a particular printer. For example, you
  22 can limit every user to 5 pages per day on an expensive printer, but
  23 you cannot limit every user except Johnny.</P>
  24
  25 <P>The <CODE>job-k-limit</CODE>, <CODE>job-page-limit</CODE>, and <CODE>job-quota-period</CODE>
  26 options determine whether and how quotas are enforced for a printer.
  27 The <CODE>job-quota-period</CODE> option determines the time interval for
  28 quota tracking. The interval is expressed in seconds, so a day is
  29 86,400, a week is 604,800, and a month is 2,592,000 seconds. The
  30 <CODE>job-k-limit</CODE> option specifies the job size limit in killobytes. The
  31 <CODE>job-page-limit</CODE> option specifies the number of pages limit.</P>
  32
  33 <P>For quotas to be enforced, the period and at least one of the limits
  34 must be set to a non-zero value. The following options will enable
  35 weekly quotas with the given size and page count limits:</P>
  36
  37 <PRE CLASS="command">
  38 <KBD>/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p <I>printer</I> -o job-quota-period=604800 \
  39     -o job-k-limit=1024 ENTER</KBD>
  40 <KBD>/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p <I>printer</I> -o job-quota-period=604800 \
  41     -o job-page-limit=100 ENTER</KBD>
  42 </PRE>
  43
  44 <P>Or, you can combine all three options on the same line.</P>
  45
  46 <P>While there is no way to query the current quota state for a particular
  47 user, any application can request a list of jobs for a user and printer that
  48 can be used to easily determine that information.</P>
  49
  50
  51 <H2 CLASS="title"><A NAME="PAGELOG">Page Logging</A></H2>
  52
  53 <P>CUPS logs every page that is printed on a system to the
  54 <VAR><A HREF="ref-page_log.html">page_log</A></VAR> file. Page logging
  55 is only available for drivers that provide page accounting information,
  56 typically all PostScript and CUPS raster devices. Raw queues and queues
  57 using third-party solutions such as Foomatic generally do not have
  58 useful page accounting information available.</P>
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