ddaniel@lindy.stanford.edu (D. Daniel Sternbergh) (10/02/90)
About ten days ago, in article <1990Sep18.181049.24115@portia.Stanford.EDU> I wrote: >I administer two small Mac networks in my department here, including >one departmental (semi-public) cluster. I've discovered that none of >the commercial software available for managing security or access to >the machines is useful in the type of University environment that I >deal with... >As a result, I'm sending out a request for suggestions for software to >help solve a problem with usage of the cluster LaserWriter. I received quite a number of responses, and want to show my gratitude to the net community as a whole by summarizing them here. I am not yet certain which will prove to be the most effective for our needs, but they offer enough different options that anyone in a similar situation may find something useful. At Dartmouth College, they place a sturdy cardboard box with a hole in the top and a sign indicating a 10 cent/page cost to cover paper, toner, and routing maintenance. A wonderfully honourable solution. At Brown, they use a magcard reader attached to the LW -- much like the copy machine cards used in many university libraries. Berkeley Math uses a locally written "perl" language script to query the printers about which users have printed how many pages on which printer. One other option which seems viable, but not in our particular situation, is to install LaserFix on the machines in the Mac cluster, and disconnect the LW from the network. In this way, users could "send" print jobs to postscript files on floppies. A stand-alone Mac with the LW in some more supervised area with a copy of a utility like SendPS, to allow users to send the postscript file to the LW, would allow any printable file to be printed, even without the application which generated the output on the machine with the printer. The nuisance of saving the file and printing it on a different machine is substantial, but should cut down on printing of multiple draft copies, and if sufficiently supervised, could cut down on printing multiple copies of documents. R. Silverman of Wesleyan has written a modified LaserPrep file, which contains a number of features which can be individually enabled or disabled. It can (i) limit the number of copies per job; (ii) print a trailer page after every job with user and document name, number of pages, and, optionally, a charge for the job; (iii) limit the number of pages in a job; (iv) disallow manual feed. The modified LaserPrep file can also change the printer password to prevent using another LaserPrep file (since the password is stored in non-volatile memory, it survives when the printer is turned off). Both the postscript LaserPrep file and accompanying documentation are available by anonymous ftp from eagle.wesleyan.edu. I've been trying to get information about an application by Jim Burns called "LaserCount". If I understand correctly, you log onto the printer with a userid and password, and the printer keeps count of the pages you print. According to Mr. Burns, the product has not sold well in the past, and may no longer be commercially available. Unfortunately the distributor, an outfit whose answering service alternately answers the phone "CompuWare" and "LaserCount", has failed to return any of my phone calls. Their number (in Texas, but it forwards to NJ -- I don't have a better number, sorry) is (512) 327-2778. If anyone gets more information, I've received enough requests for info about LaserCount to warrant a summary to the newsgroup. Because LaserCount stores its information in the printer memory, it is lost after power down, so would only be suitable if the printer could not be generally accessed. It might be possible to rely on user naivete by changing the printer password so no printing could be done after turning the printer off until a LaserPrep with the correct password could be manually downloaded. This might prove a sufficient threat to keep people from turning off the LaserWriter. One would have to rely on their not discovering that the information was stored in the LW; otherwise a malicious user could print a large job then turn the LW off, clearing their account and only inconveniencing other users. Finally, the high tech solution for a Mac cluster already connected to UNIX machines via LocalTalk-Ethernet gateway (e.g. Shiva FastPath) would be to run CAP and Transcript on the UNIX machines and connect the PostScript LW to one of the UNIX machines. A hacked version of lwsrv (the original of which comes with CAP) forwards the print job to the printer only if the user has a valid user name and password (as determined by querying the UserInfo daemon residing on the user's Mac); the local accounting system keeps track of pages and cost. I realize I've just given a brief summary here; if anyone is interested in more details, send me e-mail and I'll send you everything I have about the particular option you're interested in. == Daniel == Daniel Sternbergh ddaniel@lindy.stanford.edu Local Network Administrator Materials Science & Engineering