Print quotas for a small mixed network

December 26, 2006 1:47 PM

What is the most striaghtforward solution for setting up user accounts with quotas for printing on a small closed office network, mixed Mac OSX 10.4 (mostly, PPC and one Intel) and Windows XP (one machine), printing to a HP 3390 laser all-in-one?

I'm looking for something with simple browser interface, individual user accounts with quotas that require a user to log in to print from *any* machine on the network, which I suppose means a dedicated print server acting as a gateway to the HP. It could be router-based, or it could run on the Windows XP box or any of the Macs (I'd prefer it on the Intel iMac, which is where I administer most of the network from). I can use OS X server on the iMac, but it seems like overkill for this purpose. Thoughts?

posted by spitbull to computers & internet (3 comments total)

Have you looked at HP Web Jetadmin? (HP.com)
posted by mphuie at 1:57 PM on December 26, 2006

JetAdmin does not enforce quotas.
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:03 PM on December 26, 2006

Recently, where I work, I was set in charge of setting up print quotas for a Linux/Mac/Windows environment. Because I didn't want to spend any money, I evaluated some open source options for this.

PyKota is an option. It's written in python, and uses an sql database or LDAP to hold quota information, and works with a cups server.

The author seems to have made it as non-Free as possible without actually making it non-Free. It was clunky, crashed a lot, and didn't really work. However, it has lots of features!!!!11!1!1!1!!!!!!!11!11

I read a chapter of the CUPS book and wrote a hardware-page-counting-through-SNMP-logging-to-plain-text-files backend in python.

I haven't released it because of Real Life getting in the way, but i'm going to keep an eye on this thread. If there aren't any good solutions, maybe I'll write some comments and post it online. Send me an email and bug me about it if you're interested.
posted by adamwolf at 4:33 PM on December 26, 2006