I decided a couple of days ago, after reading more about the capabilities of Pykota, that it may be the way forward for print accounting and management. For those not in the know, Pykota is an addon to CUPS (the printing subsystem for Linux) which does lots of clever accounting and reporting stuff on a print server.
Some of the particularly interesting features of Pykota and CUPS are:
* Users are not charged if the job does not print
* Jobs can be 're-processed' to add headers and the like that could include the username!
* Ability to save PDFs of all the jobs printed for keeping an eye on the little darlings
* Windows clients only need a single printer driver - CUPS then converts to the relevant format for the printer
We currently use Print Manager Plus and I don't have an issue with it. I recently upgraded to an MSDE backend and since then it has been VERY stable (not that it was unstable before) and it takes care of charging the little darlings like it should.
The reason that I decided to take the plunge with Pykota though, is mostly cost. The annual software maintenance is approx. £200 and if this cost can be saved it could be better spent elsewhere. There is a nominal fee of €25 for Pykota (I paid £25) which is a kind of donation to get access to the downloads of current and future releases - even just for an initial play it's probably worth it and it supports open software too.
Anyway... software downloaded and armed with a spare server from the cupboard (loaded with hard disks in case I want to start saving PDFs) I began the install.
I'll post more soon... possibly a mini-howto. It's just a bit of a steep learning curve at the moment since I've never run a Linux print server before.
3 comments:
I've been tinkering with just vanilla CUPS at Carr Hill. Unfortunatly I've been off sick so I've been unable to complete the project. However currently I've hit a snag with the CUPS printer driver. As is, I can't seem to get samba to associate the printer driver with the shared printer queue. I try to do 'add driver' from the add printer wizard on the windows side of the equation but I just get a rather unhelpful 'Access Denied' error. Any pointers would be helpful when you've done this part of the setup. :)
In the documentation, it says which files are needed by the CUPS postscript driver. All I did was add these to /etc/samba/drivers and run 'cupsaddsamba'as instructed. The files were copied and hey presto! (after tinkering with the permissions on the samba print$ share).
I'll try to add all this into the documentation.
yeah, cheers for the pointer Ric. It did boil down to that. While I did have the CUPS driver for windows I had neglected to grab the dlls for the Microsoft postscript driver.
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