Billing users per print / per minute of Internet Usage

jim_chard

jim_chard

Registered
Hi all,

I am looking to open an Internet Cafe, and am probably going to use eMacs running 10.3 as the platform.

Many years ago I was a Sun SysAdmin and I remember using 'acct' to bill groups of users based on their usage of printers -- anyone know either:

1) whether this, or an equivalent exists in 10.2 / 10.3, and whether it can also include billing of Internet Usage ?
2) if I can get any documentation about how to configure it ?
3) whether someone has created a piece of (preferable freeware;) ) software (running on OS X, not Windoze) to manage an Internet Cafe e.g. how many pages printed, how many minutes online, manage (lock / unlock X on client workstations etc.) ?

As you may have gathered, I have no experience whatsoever with OS X, nor with Macs, but from what I've seen lately, this is my loss !!

many thanks for any help

Jim

ps. Internet cafe will be very small and on Koh Pha-gnan, Thailand - so all and any of you will be very welcome visitors !!!
 
Interesting. All of the software I've found for this has been developed for Windows (see here and here), but there are definitely ways of tracking usage on Unix-based machines. Maybe universities have ways of doing this on cross-platform systems, for instance.

Know anyone in a university IT department? Or does anyone reading this post work in that setting? I'll post again if I find anything of *actual* value.
 
I think most places do this with an http proxy. You will have all the computers go through the proxy, and the first time the person starts the browser they have to log in. After that the proxy will record what the user does. You would want to make sure they log out or you can take the last date/time that there was activity from a computer signed in under their account.

There is one, very popular, but also very complicated proxy called Squid

I have never used it because I have no need for it, but I'm sure there is something available for the proxy, either by analizing logs, or built into the proxy itself.
 
CUPS is used for printing in OS X. I know you can set print quotas under CUPS, and I suspect you can go over records of usage, etc...
 
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