HELP - how to start printer accounting

[Horst Spandl]

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 at ira.uka.de)
Karlsruhe University, West-Germany