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The FreeBSD print spooler can manage accounting statistics
for printer usage. The spooler counts each page printed and
generates totals for each user. In this manner departments or
individuals can be charged money for their use of the
printer.
In the academic world, such as student computer labs,
accounting is very political. Many schemes have been
developed to attempt to gather statistics to charge people
(generally students) for printing. Administrators in this
environment who deal with printers can have almost as many
accounting problems as printer problems. In the corporate
environment, on the other hand, accounting is not as
important. I strongly recommend against any corporation
attempting to implement printer accounting on shared printers
for a number of reasons:
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The entire UNIX accounting system is based on ASCII
printouts. It is easy to count the number of ASCII pages,
form feeds, or text lines in a print job. In
corporations, however, PostScript and HPPCL are generally
the order of the day. It is almost impossible to figure
out by examining the datastream how many pages it will
occupy, and even if this could be done accurately, it
wastes significant computational resources.
Note: It is possible to get some PostScript
printers to count pages, but doing so requires a
bidirectional connection to the printer and
additional programming on the UNIX system. This task
is beyond the scope of this book.
-
Banner pages aren't included in UNIX printer
accounting counts. Therefore, someone submitting 20
two-page jobs uses much more paper than does someone
submitting one 40 page job, yet both are charged the same
amount.
-
The username of the submitter can be easily forged, if
the job is remotely submitted over the network from a
client (practically all jobs in a Windows client printing
environment are remotely submitted). Although some LPR
clients can be set to authenticate, and the rs capability can be set to enforce
authentication, not all can, especially Windows LPR
clients.
-
It is more difficult for a submitter to hide the IP
number or machine name of the remote client, but in a
Windows environment there is no guarantee that someone
was sitting at a particular desktop machine when the job
was submitted.
-
A business generates no revenue by monitoring printer
usage. In the academic community, however, when a student
lab charges for printouts the lab is actually extracting
money from an entity (the student) that is separate from
the lab. Within a corporation, the concept of department
A getting revenue from user B is pointless and doesn't
generate a net gain for the corporation as a whole.
For my printer administration, I have found that I can
save more money on printing costs by purchasing supplies
wisely than by attempting to discourage printing through
"chargebacks". What is the sense of being miserly with
printing while spending double on toner cartridges
because no one is willing to comparison shop, or signing
a "lease" agreement that isn't beneficial for the
printer? When you get down to it, corporate users don't
care much for print sharing anyway, and they generally
only agree to it because the administrator can buy a far
bigger, faster, and fancier printer than they can
requisition.
-
Worse yet, if usage on a shared printer is charged, it
encourages employees to look for other places to print.
Inevitably, people run out buy cheap inkjet printers for
their own use, and the business ends up spending more on
paper and supplies for many poor-quality small printers,
than it would for a few decent big ones. Moreover, the
inferior output of these printers makes the organization
as a whole look bad.
-
The corporate spirit should be one of teamwork, not
bickering. The surest way to kill a network in a
corporation is to set up a situation that puts the
administrator into the policeman position or pits one
department against another.
The only justification I've ever seen for running
accounting on corporate printers is using the accounting
system to automate reminders to the administrator to replace
paper, or toner. Aside from this use, a corporation that
implements accounting as a way of encouraging employees not
to waste paper ends up defeating the purpose of turning on
accounting.
This, and other documents, can be
downloaded from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/.
For questions about FreeBSD, read the
documentation
before contacting <questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.
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