Explored some options for print station kiosks and print accounting.
Accounting’s relatively easy — LPRng can run a command at filter time to grab the current pagecount off the printer via SNMP. In fact, I’ve already done that for some printers. It’s only a minor stretch to stuff that info into a database where we can track it and charge if that’s the word.
The kiosk station is a little trickier. There seem to be a few weird, dead, or otherwise untenable projects that set up kiosks at the printers (well, aside from commercial systems, which seems to be what almost everybody uses). I’m probably going to end up writing my own web interface to the LPRng queue system which will, among other things, look nice, work properly, and hopefully not require some monster set of dependancies that don’t fit our environment. Hmm… it’s a wheel — maybe I can make a better one.
Posted by Rowan Littell at November 29, 2004 07:43 PM