CUPS accounting and IPP

[Michael Goffioul]

Nicolas AUFFRAY wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm working on installing a CUPS Server with Samba as a print server for 
> my enterprise. We have about 60 computers for many with Windows NT4 and 
> 2000 and few with linux. The way is to install many more linux instead 
> of Windows. Great !
> 
> But, obligation to make accounting is required. As I see each job is 
> save in an IPP report which is not deleted as I mark the Job History 
> preserverd or something like that.
> So, I would like to know is a software which make web reports using IPP 
> reports and/or the cups page_log ?
> 
> The best would be to have one which make reports for both or two 
> softwares for the each one. I think using both could make better 
> accounting since I see some jobs not reporting in page_log but just on 
> an IPP report.

The "problem" is that IPP job info and page accounting are located
in 2 different places: IPP job info is in CUPS spool dir while the
global page accounting is in the page_log in the log directory.
The former is accessible through IPP requests, the latter is only
accessible by reading the file directly (although future versions
of CUPS might allow downloading log files through HTTP requests).

So, having a tool to can do both proably doesn't exists. Nevertheless
you can have a look at pykota (see CUPS 3rd party tools) which
provides powerful accounting mechanims: maybe there's a log
generation built-in.

But in the end, if you're a C programmer, doing a full IPP and
page accounting tool shouldn't be too difficult. Just grab all
completed jobs from the server through IPP requests: the IPP
answer contains the number of pages for each job. So you have
all the info to built a nice web report.

Otherwise, the separate existing tools I know are:
- IPP report: KDE job viewer
- page accounting report: LIRE, klogtool (work-in-progress
   available through CVS in the kdenonbeta package under the
   cupslogtool directory)

Michael.

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Michael Goffioul		IMEC-DESICS-MIRA
e-mail: goffioul at imec.be	(Mixed-Signal and RF Applications)
Tel:    +32/16/28-8510		Kapeldreef, 75
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