doc/help/accounting.html

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   4         <TITLE>Printer Accounting Basics</TITLE>
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   8
   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 online.</P>
  14
  15
  16 <H2 CLASS="title"><A NAME="QUOTAS">Quota Support</A></H2>
  17
  18 <P>CUPS supports page and size-based quotas for each printer.
  19 The quotas are tracked individually for each user, but a single set of
  20 limits applies to all users for a particular printer. For example, you
  21 can limit every user to 5 pages per day on an expensive printer, but
  22 you cannot limit every user except Johnny.</P>
  23
  24 <P>The <CODE>job-k-limit</CODE>, <CODE>job-page-limit</CODE>, and <CODE>job-quota-period</CODE>
  25 options determine whether and how quotas are enforced for a printer.
  26 The <CODE>job-quota-period</CODE> option determines the time interval for
  27 quota tracking. The interval is expressed in seconds, so a day is
  28 86,400, a week is 604,800, and a month is 2,592,000 seconds. The
  29 <CODE>job-k-limit</CODE> option specifies the job size limit in kilobytes. The
  30 <CODE>job-page-limit</CODE> option specifies the number of pages limit.</P>
  31
  32 <P>For quotas to be enforced, the period and at least one of the limits
  33 must be set to a non-zero value. The following options will enable
  34 weekly quotas with the given size and page count limits:</P>
  35
  36 <PRE CLASS="command">
  37 <KBD>/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p <I>printer</I> -o job-quota-period=604800 \
  38     -o job-k-limit=1024 ENTER</KBD>
  39 <KBD>/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p <I>printer</I> -o job-quota-period=604800 \
  40     -o job-page-limit=100 ENTER</KBD>
  41 </PRE>
  42
  43 <P>Or, you can combine all three options on the same line.</P>
  44
  45 <P>While there is no way to query the current quota state for a particular
  46 user, any application can request a list of jobs for a user and printer that
  47 can be used to easily determine that information.</P>
  48
  49
  50 <H2 CLASS="title"><A NAME="PAGELOG">Page Logging</A></H2>
  51
  52 <P>CUPS can log every page that is printed on a system to the <VAR><A HREF="man-cupsd-logs.html">page_log</A></VAR> file. Page logging must be enabled by setting the <CODE>PageLogFormat</CODE> directive in the <VAR><A HREF="man-cupsd.conf.html">cupsd.conf</A></VAR> file and 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>
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