PaperCut

PaperCut has two types of colour detection. Page-level and document-level (also called standard detection). Document-level is the default as it works with most printers. It works by applying the grayscale discount when the user selects the Grayscale or Black & White option in the printer preferences screen. The info in the link above should help. The key is to ensure PaperCut is detecting the job as "grayscale" as listed in its print log. If you continue to have issues, shoot an email through to support /a papercut . com. Cheers, Chris Developer @ PaperCut

Hi, You're correct that Print Limit Pro is an OEM rebrand of PaperCut. Print-Limit is however running almost a year behind in releases :-( We're pushing them to try and keep up to date. I'm not aware that they offer UK support, however I'd recommend getting in touch and testing them out... the client should not crashing! If you have any trouble getting action out of them, let me know and I can follow up from my end. Regarding PaperCut support, I'm one of the developers at PaperCut in our Melbourne office and would be happy to offer any EduGeeks direct developer level support except on days were England defeat Australia in the Cricket :-) Just PM me. I'm also online early morning UK time (afternoon our time). Also there are two good PaperCut resellers in the UK that are technically focused - ITS and Select Tech. Cheers, Chris chris Developer @ PaperCut

Hi clodhopper, I'm one of the Linux developer's here at PaperCut. First, if most of your workstations are Windows, then considering Samba is a good choice. You'll find that it integrates very well with CUPS and will transparently expose the CUPS queues as standard Window shared queues with very little, if any configuration. Regarding your current problem; The issue will be the slightly tighter default security settings on CentOS. The default security is "Require user @SYSTEM" meaning that only local users listed in /etc/passwd can access printers. A simply solution is to open this up like: AuthType None and then reply on PaperCut's popup authentication to enforce security. The other options are to expose the queues via Samba (with security=domain) or setup Winbind (advanced). To point out a few other CentOS traps: * Access is restricted to @LOCAL by default. This means that only computers in the same Subnet as the server can access the printers. Watch out for this one if you have multiple subnets. * The "Listen" setting may strict access to localhost only. Try removing this line and replacing with just "Port 631". Hope this helps. Cheers, Chris

Hi SYNACK, Finally found the hour today to finish of the changes you requested. I've uploaded a new version of PaperCut Print Logger. You can download this from the usual location here. I've put in both changes: There is a global CSV log called papercut-print-log-all-time.csv that contains all printing. This will allow you to remove the concatenation portion of your code and speed up the page rendering. It is now possible to set the CSV log file target directory via the papercut-print-logger.conf file. It is also possible to set this to a UNC path, however in this case you'll need to elevate the "Log On" rights on the "PaperCut Print Logger Service" to a user account that access to write to the UNC share. Hope this helps, and keep up the good work! .... now I'm back to trying to get PaperCut working on 64-bit Novell cluster server :-( Cheers, Chris

Even more scary to think there are so many stuck-in-the-mud developers still around in today's "more open" world SYNACK, I've booked out some time this Friday to make the changes. I'll let you know when they're done. Cheers, Chris

Hi SYNACK, Done! A global log is an easy change so I'll get that one in. The ability to write the log onto a different server is technically possible but poses a number of issues. By default our service runs under the semi-restricted SYSTEM account and this account does not have access to remote network shares (for security reasons). We'd need to elevate the service's rights to write to a network resource. In the *nix world, this is a bit of a no-no as you should always aim to run with as lowest privileges as possible. It's a bit more acceptable in the Windows world, but even this is now changing. There are a few options: 1) You could use a separate script (e.g. a simple batch file using say robocopy) that runs as a scheduled task to copy the files across periodically. 2) I could allow the path of the all_printing log to be changed. This could be for example set to a share like \\server\share, however you'd need to manually change the rights allocated to the service. e.g. change the account on the server's "Log On" tab from SYSTEM to a domain account that has write access to the share. Either way, I think option 2 would be useful so I'll look at supporting this. PaperCut Print Logger is a spare time Friday Project. I should get some time in the next few weeks and will let you know when this is done. No. Not at all! Please go ahead. More than happy for you to polish up the number crunching as long as you keep sharing the code with all the rest of the EduGeeks :-) We're very supportive of people extending and building on our software. In fact we got to great lengths to support this in PaperCut NG such as providing an open Web Services APIs with dozens of functions and examples in many programing languages, a scripting interface, the ability to style our web interface via CSS/HTML, and a published database schema. We even provide our customers with source code access to assist them with their integration (oh... and to help us find bugs :-)! Some of the projects school admins have done with our API are amazing. My favorite was the school tech that had way too much time on his hands one summer break. He wired up PaperCut to the library management system so when students don't bring their books back on time, his system would automatically "fine" the student by taking money out of their print and internet quota. He said nothing made the students bring their books back quicker than seeing their balance dwindle down each day :-)

Shame Python is missing from the list. It's a clean simple language and has great integration with the OS. e.g. COM support in Windows that allows you to script with COM in the same way as you would with VBScript. And of course, it's just as home on Linux and is installed by default on the Mac. Python gets my votes and with companies like Google behind it, it's sure to have a long life. Ruby is another good choice but concepts such as closures can take a bit of getting use to.

Hi Synack, That's good work. I'm the developer at PaperCut that looks after print logger. It was my idea to "convince" the rest of the team that we should release a free logger based off the analysis code we have in PaperCut NG. Really to create a small little tool for administrators that does one thing and does it well. It also helps us out. Of course there is some indirect promotion of PaperCut NG, our print quota application, however the main benefit is that we have thousands of new people downloading it every week and as a result we find the bugs a little quicker :-) I like the work you've done. I noticed that there is a bit of code that simply creates a concatenated log. Would it be of use if PaperCut Print Logger was to create a global "all_printing" log as standard? This would be an easy change. The only reason I didn't do it in the first place was that certain version of MS Excel tend to freak out with large CSV files. Splitting the logs into months eliminates this issue. Also on the topic of Print Logger, I receive emails all the times with some cool tips and tricks. Here are a few of my favorite: * Take a few minutes to learn about the pivot table and pivot chart feature in Excel. You can get some really interesting stats quickly with these features. e.g. point the finger at the teacher that's wasting the most paper :-) * It's very easy to make the logs available over your intranet. Simply set up IIS and add an IIS Virtual Directory pointing to C:/Program Files/PaperCut Print Logger/logs/html/ . One admin emailed me to say that he did this and emailed the link to everyone in the company! All of a sudden printing dropped by 20%. Seems like people are reluctant to print "My European Vacation Photos.jpg" when they know it's being audited :-) * Use Excel to calculate your organization's environmental impact. This can be done copying these formulas into any free field in the Excel sheet: Formula for trees consumed: =IF(SUM(C:C)/80500 < 1, ROUND(SUM(C:C)/80500 * 100, 2) & "% of a tree", ROUND(SUM(C:C)/80500,2) & " trees") Formula for CO2: =ROUND(SUM(C:C) * 8.6 / 1000, 2) & " kg of CO2" Formula for energy equivalent: ="Equivalent to running a 60W light glob for " & ROUND(SUM(C:C)* 17 / 60, 2) & " hours" For reference, the coefficients are explained here: Environmental Impact Also, seeing I work for PaperCut, I better put in a plug :-) Most of this can be done in PaperCut NG as well as print quotas, department level accounting for staff via a popup and automatic emailing of reports. We also have just released a version for Novell so now we have implementations for major platforms - Windows, Mac, Linux and Novell. Tens-of-thousands of schools run PaperCut so make sure you check it out. Also if you're from a government school in a developing country, make sure you contact us as we can arrange a free license. Cheers, Chris PS~ Notice you're from NZ. Maybe we should start a new thread about Cricket ... not :-(