spandl@ira.uka.de (Horst Spandl) (05/29/90)
Thanks for your hints concerning printer accounting. They finally set me on the right track. First, there is no connection between printer accounting and accton/sa. > From my experience with printer accounting, only the last host to > see the file before it hits the printer can do accounting. Indeed, this seems to be one of my problems. Another problem was that I did not realize the tight relationship between output filters and printer accounting. It was absolutely not clear to me that it is a MUST to specify output filters in addition to the :af=..: field to make accounting work in the first place. It would have helped a lot if the man pages on pac(8) and printcap(5) were more specific on this subject. The entries in the index of the System and Network Administration Manual are misleading. A cross reference like "printer accounting, see output filters" would have been nice. > Network printers (e.g., imagen on ethernet, dec lps40 on decnet, apple > lw on appletalk/CAP) can have printcap entries that reference the > network attachment (either in the lp= field or built into the filters) > such that a given host is the last box to have the file before it hits > the printer, so accountability is not limited to serial or parallel > printers physically attached to your system. The remote host which serves our Apple LaserWriter belongs to another department. Thus I would love to use a technique as the one described above. However, I do not have fancy patching filters. Especially as I do not have any documentation in that direction. HAS ANYBOY DONE THIS? Anyway, I think I'll try to talk the other department's system guru into setting up a monthly/weekly cron job to post the output of pac running on his machine to me. Horst Spandl (spandl@ira.uka.de) Karlsruhe University, West-Germany