Tracking abusive usage?

[ChrisP]

As for the printers, I have them set to not delete the spool file after its printed, and I have the print cue restricted to admins. Basicaly anything that is printed, I can reprint at a later date along with the time and date it was printed. It helps and costs nowt. It also puts the fear of admin into people who would otherwise print their holiday snaps off on the colour laser printer.

Sorry for the barrage of questions.

how many printers on your printserver?
how often do you clear them?
do the jobs dissapear from the print que when finished? (just leaving a file somewhere)
how much space do you find this method takes up?

ty Chris.

[mrforgetful]

We've got about 35,
Whenever I remember or there's hundreds of jobs or they stop printing (which can happen)
They stay in the queue which can confuse users when things don't print they come and say "and it says there 156 items waiting"
It depends on the job sizes, at the minute we have 1957 jobs and the spool folder is about 2.2Gb.

[ICT_GUY]

We have around 6 printers for the school. I have moved the spooler to a different partition and clear it when they start hitting 1000 documents which can be anywhere between 1-3 weeks.

There are various utils you can use to view spooled documents as well. This is pretty useful when going through the print cues. I normally check large docs on the colour laser.

[mrforgetful]

@ICT_GUY - could you recommend one of those programs? Never thought of that usually just reprint things!

Sepaking of which, wasted printing is usually charged to the student and they're account is disabled until they pay.

[ICT_GUY]

http://www.undocprint.org/formats/winspool/spl

The EMF viewer is a bit of a awkward bugger to get working, requires .net version (blowed if I know) but when working works well. There are commercial progs that work better, depends if you want to shell out £50.

[mrforgetful]

Cheers will have a look later on.