Re: protecting a colour printer
On Fri, 19 Nov 2004, martin f krafft wrote:
> So I am wondering what some strategies would look like to make sure
> they print b/w instead. We do not have a username or machine policy,
> so we cannot work with lpd accounting. Some approaches that have
> come to my mind:
Add username and machine policy, and blame it on the people who used the
printer in an irresponsible way. Double win :-) Then, add pykota to CUPS
and charge their bottoms off if they print too much on the color printer.
> - use a web interface to require prior authorisation... having to
> visit a page and entering some text will likely deter people. is
> there something out there that does this? can cups do this?
CUPS can do it. Just firewall away all means of accepting a print job
directly, and tell CUPS to require autorization to access the URLs.
For maximum effect, add a cronjob that changes the password every 2 minutes,
and shows a hint of what the new password is (preferably, a math expression
to annoy people even more, or maybe even riddles :P) as the authentication
domain. This will also kill any winblows user attempts to use IPP directly
over http...
> - is there an accounter per IP address that we could install on
> the print server?
I believe this is doable, get pykota and enhance it :) but people will
change IP addresses if they have that capability.
> What are your experiences?
Add usernames, passwords and printer accounting. It does not penalize
people who are not the problem... anything else is BOFH land, really. And
it will be useful later, if you need to control something else.
If you're in a corporate environment, print nice usage graphs with costs in
$ and send that to management. If in a student environment, require payment
for every page printed, and charge 3 times more for pages on the color
printer. I have seen both being done, and both worked just fine. Just
don't charge the students too much.
--
"One disk to rule them all, One disk to find them. One disk to bring
them all and in the darkness grind them. In the Land of Redmond
where the shadows lie." -- The Silicon Valley Tarot
Henrique Holschuh
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