accurate page accounting with raw PCL?
I'm currently using a 25MHz 486 with 8mb ram as a print server for an HP
LaserJet 6L. It's running Samba/CUPS on Debian Woody, and it works
fairly well: printing is possible from Mac OSX and another Debian box
via ipp, and from Win2k with Samba. However, since it's such a slow
beast, all the machines are set up to send raw data (PCL I think) to the
server rather than sending Postscript and letting the print server
convert into PCL with ghostscript.
This means that I can do no page accounting: the /var/log/cups/page_log
file shows that CUPS thinks that every job is one page long. Is there
any package that can give me accurate page accounting? Essentially I
think I want to get the print server to dissect the PCL to figure out
how many pages are being printed. An alternative approach would be to
query the printer to see how many pages are being printed.
A poster to comp.os.linux.misc suggested that I investigate querying the
printer over the network. The closest that I've found to this is
npadmin, but this requires that the printer have networking capabilities
and understands SNMP, neither of which is true (AFAIK) of the HPLJ6.
I'm happy to ditch CUPS if that would help...
TIA,
Rupert
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