A talk given at Stanford University's ResNet '96 Residential Halls Networking conference by Andrew L. Denmark (denmark@columbia.edu) of Columbia University's Academic Information Systems.

At Columbia we have developed several key software components which allow us to manage network printers throughout our campus. The Jake printing system integrates spool and quota management with a kerberos-based campus wide ID system which allows central and secure management of quotas and printing privileges. Each id in the kerberos database is allowed to either purchase an allocation of printing pages, or is granted a weekly quota. Once the user sends a print job to one of our network spools he/she must go to the Jake terminal associated with that spool and enter a password before the printer will start to print the document. We have found that this extra step reduces the tendency to print unwanted documents or copies, thereby saving many reams of paper a year. Until recently we have been using this system only in our computer labs. The system is now being scaled up to work in our libraries as part of the Columbia Digital Library Project and in our Residence Halls Networking Project. The ultimate goal is to do away with the "1 computer = 1 printer" model of printing which has become so common on our campus. In our residence halls we have been working on solutions for delivering print jobs to our UNIX servers which require the installation of no, or minor, additional pieces of software. Our approach is to take advantage of the more UNIX-like capabilities of today's modern operating systems and use software on our UNIX servers such as Samba (PC/Windows) and Netatalk (Macintosh) to map network printers which appear to be native to those platforms to our UNIX print spools.

• Control printing resources (paper, toner, etc...).
• Restrict access to certain groups.
• Gather statistics on printer usage.

• Interface
• Spool management
• Authentication

• Quota Management
• Security
• Statistics generation (weekly/real-time)

• Issues to think about:
  • Have a network :)
  • Networkable Postscript printers
  • ID System
  • Unix servers and people to administer them
• Columbia's ID System
• Labs, Libraries, and Residence Halls

• Jake Distribution Center (http://www.columbia.edu/~denmark/resnet96/jake-0.9.tar.Z) [SunOS 108K]

• href=http://www.columbia.edu/acis/facilities/printers -- Jake Implementation at Columbia
• http://chef.fab.albany.edu/resnet/buster/buster.htm -- Jake Implementation at SUNY Albany (a.k.a. Buster)
• http://www.umich.edu/~rsug/netatalk -- The Netatalk Homepage
• http://artoo.hitchcock.org/~flowerpt/projects/linux-netatalk -- The Linux Netatalk Homepage
• http://lake.canberra.edu.au/pub/samba -- The Samba Homepage

Academic Information Systems 212 854.4854 consultant@columbia.edu
1Jul96