Geek spool amazement

[andygates]

So on my lurgi day, the print spooler runs out of space and the server borks. J Random User sent a 5Gb print job. I come in to a sea of "wah! I cannae print, captain!" calls blinking in merry red on my Big List Of Bad.

Surely, in this 'ere day and age of practically psychic paperclips and scary, scary clever tech, it's got to be possible to tell the print spooler "reject jobs if you don't have the space for 'em"?

Apparently not.

Comments

[thudthwacker.livejournal.com]

Really, you just let each department pay upfront for an average amount, and tell managers to clobber their staff if they go bonkers.

Ah, but I work at a school, where the largest department is "students." And, in the way-back, we had a great huge DEC LP29 line printer -- huge, unkillable, tractor-feed dot-matrix demon of the ancient world. Students would get into the habit of printing, well, anything they took it into their heads they might want to have, and nobody cared. Our head of operations (a hulking ex-special-forces guy) would just tear their two-foot-thick printout off the end of the ream, stuff it in the "pick up your printouts here" box, and go on with his life. Ribbons were fairly cheap, and as mentioned, the printer itself had a duty cycle of something like four hundred quintillion pages -- let 'em print whatever they want.

Then we got, behold, one of those fancy laser printers. It, too, was free, right up until the end of the semester, when a bunch of users decided to print out all their mail. Now, toner is not cheap, you need to rubber-band big-ass printouts like those together because the pages aren't attached to each other, and the "out" bin on the printer didn't hold nearly as much as the wire basket under the LP29, so clearing it out became a Chore and and Annoyance, neither of which is very wise when the person getting the pointy end of them is 6 feet tall, 300 pounds, and used to kill people for the US army.

So, an idea was hatched to have people pay for use of the laser printer, and so the Printer Billing project was born. It went on for a few years, with ever-increasing efforts to get it Just Right, which it never was. I mean, it did a pretty good job, but there were always errors that had to be fixed and such, and in the end it was deemed to be more trouble than it was worth -- we decided to just keep overly-large printouts, and as we always knew who submitted the jobs, we could extract from them one-time charges if they abused the printing gear with regularity.

In these heady days, we give out printers with the student laptops, so we rarely have anyone who would prefer to schlep down here to get a printout than just get it done in the comfort of their dorm room. And, what printers we do have work on the UniPrint system, whereby you submit your print job to a queue, then use your ID card at any of a number of distributed printers to have said job print at said printer. It's slick, and we never have to worry about it -- having an actual budget is nice, in that it allows us to occasionally get a good vendor-provided system rather than rolling our own all the time.