Toby,
I think you're out of luck.
But how about this for a modest proposal:
Many recent printer models (what I say will apply to the Xerox Phaser series since that's what I use) keep detailed job accounting data. This data is available as arrays via SNMP. If LPRng sends the jobs with numeric indexes as user names, then one could possibly set up an SNMP trap (I know nothing about this) which would report job accounting information to your server whenever a job finished. You could use the numeric index to verify that you were getting the data for the right job.
This would eliminate the need to wait between jobs.
Let me know when you get it working. :-)
-Rick
Toby Blake wrote:
Hi there,
This goes back to a discussion of Jan 16 2004 with a subject of "I'm lost with accounting", in particular I'm replying to a post made by Jamie Jennings...
Also, you need to adjust the following lines in ifhp.conf to have appropriate settings for your environment. These lines affect how pagecounting will be done. 'pagecount_poll_start' specifies how many times to check the page counter when a job starts. In my case, I have it check once (ie. just get the number). Then it continues polling the pagecounter at 15 second intervals ('pagecount_interval') until it gets 2 ('pagecount_poll_end') consecutive values that match. Again, adjust these values based on testing with your printers (ie. the speed of your printers and the amount of delay you want/need between jobs).
##pagecount_poll=5 pagecount_poll_end=2 pagecount_poll_start=1 pagecount_interval=15 pagecount_timeout=0
I've been experimenting with various values for these variables with an HP2300. I'm using ifhp as an output filter *only*, purely in an attempt to get it to write start/end pagecounts to the acct file.
However, on experimenting with the above variables, I find the results to be unsatisfactory purely on the grounds that to get accurate start and end pagecounts, I have to slow down the printing process to an unnacceptable degree. For instance, I've found that I have to have a pagecount_poll_start value of 2, as otherwise it will sometimes come back with a value of 0. Also, I seem to need a pagecount_interval of at least 10 and a pagecount_poll_end value of at least 3 for the end pagecount to be logged correctly. All this means that every print job has a delay of at least 10 seconds at the start and at least 20 seconds at the end. This is unacceptable for a busy printer.
I was wondering if other people have come up across this kind of problem and what they do to overcome it?
Cheers Toby Blake University of Edinburgh
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