(this article needs more info, please add to it if you know more)

Lots of people, particularly in educational environments and public access points need to restrict user's printing. There are many models for doing this, including:

• the admins want to restrict users to a quota of sheets per day/week/month.
• the user can submit a print job which a supervisor must approve before printing.

Queueing Jobs For Approval

To have print jobs queued for approval, you can edit the cups printer file /etc/cups/printers.conf and in the stanza for a particular printer, add the line:

Option job-hold-until indefinite

The supervisor can then go the webpage http://<cups-servername>:631/, login and look at the print queue. They should see the job (paused) and can approve it for printing or remove it from the queue. The supervisor must be in the cupsys group.

Quotas

Although this author has not used quotas, it seems that some information on it would be useful here. This page seems to describe a simple way to do quotas:

• http://linux.unimelb.edu.au/server/course/fc3/cups.html

although if you need more, the PyKota quota add-on for CUPS provides more powerful quota systems for CUPS.

• http://www.pykota.com/

• http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Printing/PyKota-Print-Quota-System-5421.shtml

The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) documentation is here:

• http://www.cups.org/documentation.php