printqd

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printqd — Print quota daemon for LPRng

Description

Printqd is a daemon to allow or deny print jobs on LPRng print systems. It can be used to simply allow/deny printing for users based on user name or group membership. If LPRng can retrieve page counter values from printers printqd can be used to enforce page limits or to calculate the amount of pages printed by a user within a given time period.

Printqd was developed specifically for LPRng, it can not be used with other print systems.

The program was developed with schools and universities in mind to stop stupid printing. These institutions can allow every student a page limit of n pages per semester/trimester on all PC classroom printers in summary without having to configure each user individually. On a semester start all used pages numbers records are removed using one administrative command, so all users are reset to "0 pages printed".
Inidividual accounts can be created (i.e. for those doing bachelor/master thesis in-house or for students assisting in projects or for pre-paid printing additional pages). These individual accounts are not affected by the global reset command.

LPRng checks once whether a print job is allowed to be printed before starting processing. So printqd compares the number of pages used within the general limit against the limit value and allows printing if the limit is not yet reached. If the limit is reached printqd checks whether there is a positive number of pages in the personal print account.
This checking is only done once before a print job is sent to a printer, the entire print job is printed if the check succeeds.
So the LPRng/printqd combination probably allows one last print job of every user to exceed the limit, but no further print jobs are allowed for that user.

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Manual

See the [printqd manual] for the full documentation of the program.

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