On Fri, 30 May 2003, Rick Cochran wrote: > What sort of software accounting do you use? >
We run all the jobs thru ghostscript to generate low-res PNG images for each page. We estimate the amount of toner that's going to be used by using percentblack from printbill. Job cost is based on number of pages actually printed (where hardware counting works) and the amount of toner used. We also compare the estimated number of pages to what the printer says to try and people doing creative things with the printer. We currently use a simple flat file DB to store the balance of accounts. The DB is being migrated to something that is row lockable to help speed things up when we have a high load. We don't let people have a negative balance. We only started charging for the toner usage in Jan. We had problems where a small minority of students were abusing the printers by printing pages that were all/mostly black. Our toner usage went way up and the printers had a lot of problems with jamming. If you're interested in all the gory details of our scripts, let me know and I'll post them somewhere. Matt ---------------------------------------------------------- Matthew Forrest - System Administrator School of Computer Science Phone: 416-979-5000 x16964 Ryerson Polytechnic University Fax: 416-979-5064 ---------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOU MUST BE A LIST MEMBER IN ORDER TO POST TO THE LPRNG MAILING LIST The address you post from MUST be your subscription address If you need help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or lprng-requests or lprng-digest-requests) with the word 'help' in the body. For the impatient, to subscribe to a list with name LIST, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with: | example: subscribe LIST <mailaddr> | subscribe lprng-digest [EMAIL PROTECTED] unsubscribe LIST <mailaddr> | unsubscribe lprng [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you have major problems, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word LPRNGLIST in the SUBJECT line. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
