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[previous article] [next article]Stacey Clark
If you print to a public ECN laser, chances are good that you have a laser account, limiting the number of pages you are allowed to print on that laser. You may wonder why there is accounting on the amount of pages you print on the laser. Well, paper isn't free. If you have no limit, then a runaway job can print for a thousand pages, instead of 200 or 300 pages. You will have people who print out every joke in alt.tasteless.jokes. Mostly, page accounting is set to encourage people to preview before printing and not waste trees worth of paper!
So, one thing you may wish to do is check on how many pages you have printed. Guess what? There is a command you can use to do that!
% /usr/ecn/cap/lwinfo ci2
Login: stacey
Real Name: Stacey Clark
Group: ecn
Page limit: 1180
Pages used: 42
Expiration: May, 1995
lpr permission: Yes
You may have multiple laser accounts, for example, in CE all
students get accounts on ci2, ca4, ca11, and cl5. In ChE
students get accounts on ki3, ki2, and ka9. In CE, you can
transfer pages between all 4 lasers; so, if you find out that
you are always in Civil 3144, where the cl5 laser is, you can
login to CN and do this:
cn => /usr/ecn/cap/lwpages
Taking pages from? ca4
LaserWriter "ca4" account information:
Page limit: 1000
Pages used: 13
Pages available to move: 987
Moving pages where? cl5
LaserWriter "cl5" account information:
Page limit: 1000
Pages used: 1
The number of pages to move? 5
The "ca4" account: (subtracted 5)
New Page limit: 995
Pages used: 13
The "cl5" account: (added 5)
New Page limit: 1005
Page used: 1
There are some caveats to this procedure. For example, in
ChE, the ki3 laser is a double sided printer. Because you are
saving paper by printing double sided, we don't want you to
move pages from a double sided printer to a single sided
printer. Thus, a restriction is in place to prevent moving
pages from ki3 to ki2 or ka9. Some printers also print using
more expensive paper, like the ci3 laser name is attached to
the same printer as ci2; but, if you send a printer job to
ci3, large size paper is used. So, if you have a ci3 laser
account, you can't move pages from another printer to that
laser account.In the past, you had to worry that if you completely ran out of pages on one laser, you were stuck, because your lpr permission was removed. A new feature was added to lwpages on March 31st, that now will check your printer permission, and re-enable your lpr permission if you add enough pages to your laser account.
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