quickest way to turn Papercut off temporarily

[BatchFile]

Quick question:

 

OFSTED are coming in and I want to suspend Papercut print quota-ing while they're here to make lessons go as smoothly as possible.

What's the quickest way to do that (easily reversibly)? stop the service? would that work?

[sidewinder]

should be able to stop the service no problem - we recently discovered that the service had been stopped (accidentaly) and we had no records of any printing for the last few months - there were no problems with any printing in this period so you should be fine

[BatchFile]

I've actually decided to leave PC running, but have set the printer prices to £0.00 - that way we can keep monitoring printing but nobody gets blocked

[PaperCut]

I've actually decided to leave PC running, but have set the printer prices to £0.00 - that way we can keep monitoring printing but nobody gets blocked

 

That's a smart move - just to remember to set the costs to a real amount when you need to go live with your print quotas again :-)

 

If the date periods are known in advance then another option is to use PaperCut's Advanced Print Scripting. You could for example write a print script that sets the cost to zero for given conditions. For example, during a given a date range, the user's group, the printer selected, or a combination of factors. Scripts are written in JavaScript which makes it pretty easy. For example, here is a script I wrote to allow free printing during science lab class time. You could use this as a starting point.

 

 

/*
* Free printing during class time
*
* Members of the Students group get free printing to science lab printers 
* during lab time (2:00pm to 5:00pm Mondays).
*/
function printJobHook(inputs, actions) {

   var MONDAY      = 1;  // 0 = Sunday, 1 = Monday

   var day         = inputs.job.date.getDay(); 
   var hour        = inputs.job.date.getHours();

   if (day == MONDAY
           && (hour >= 14 && hour < 17)
           && inputs.user.isInGroup("Students")) {

       /*
        * Confirm that the printing is class related. Make it look nice
        * with HTML formatting.
        */
       var response = actions.client.promptYesNo(
               "Free printing is available for lab work only.

"
               + "Is this printing course/lab related?"
               + "");

       // If the user did not respond, cancel the job and exit the script.
       if (response == "TIMEOUT") {
           actions.log.debug("User did not response to lab work question."); 
           actions.job.cancel();
           return;
       }
   
       if (response == "YES") {
           
           // Set the job cost to zero
           actions.job.setCost(0.0);
           
           // Record the reason for free printing in the job comment.
           actions.job.addComment("Free science lab class printing.");
       }


       /*
        * For tracking only, we'll also record the name of any user that 
        * is using the printers for non-course work.
        */
       if (response == "NO") {

           actions.log.info("User '" + inputs.job.username + "' used the"
                   + " science lab printer for non-lab work.");
       }

   }
}

 

There are also a number of other Script Recipes that work in a similar way. It's always best to start with one of these, however if you're a hard core coder, feel free to start out from scratch with the API reference!

 

Hope this helps.

 

PS: I think print scripting is the coolest feature in PaperCut, but then again I'd say that as I was one of the developers who worked on the feature

 

 

Cheers,

 

Chris

Developer@PaperCut

[tmcd35]

I've actually decided to leave PC running, but have set the printer prices to £0.00 - that way we can keep monitoring printing but nobody gets blocked

 

Probably a bit late now, but this is how I do it -

 

in Papercut - select all users and bulk modify. Under 'Restrictions' set to 'Not Restrictred' and save.

 

Job done. In the same way set 'Restrictions' back to 'Restricted' when you want to apply quota's again.

[Soulfish]

 

PS: I think print scripting is the coolest feature in PaperCut, but then again I'd say that as I was one of the developers who worked on the feature

 

 

Cheers,

 

Chris

Developer@PaperCut

 

That's because print scripting is a pretty cool feature . I've only dipped my toe into using print scripts but they are a great tool