Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!haven!adm!cmcl2!phri!roy
From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: LaserWriter accounting from Macintoshes
Message-ID: <3788@phri.UUCP>
Date: 30 May 89 15:39:13 GMT
Organization: Public Health Research Institute, NYC, NY
Lines: 33


	A friend of mine wants to have people on a public Mac be able to print
to a LaserWriter and have their printer usage accounted for.  I think I've
worked out a neat way to do this and wanted to see what other people thought.

	The basic setup will be an Ultrix vax with the LW attached to a 9600
baud serial line.  A Kinetics KFPS-4 will bridge to an AppleTalk net with some
Macintoshes on it.  All the Macs (probably Mac-II's with 2-4 Mbytes) will run
multifinder.  The vax will be running a modified version of lwsrv and the
Macs will have staticly assigned IP addresses.

	When a print job comes in, the lwsrv will look at the "%%Creator:"
line to see which Mac it came from and then look to see if any telnet
connections are comming from the IP address assigned to that mac.  If not, it
will drop the print job, simulating a PostScript error message something along
the lines of "%%[ Error: User authorization failure, please log in ]%%".  The
Mac printer driver should then obligingly put that message up in a dialog box.

	If somebody is logged in, lwsrv will change the "%%Creator:" line
to indicate that user and do a setuid to that user so the lpr accounting
charges the job to the right place.  Thus, to print something, you need to
launch telnet and login to the vax.  You don't have to do anything, just
keep the login connection open in the background.

	What do you think?  Does this sound reasonable?  I'm not worried
about possible sophisticated ways to spoof it, just that it will prevent
casual users from using the LaserWriter without their usage being accounted
for.
-- 
Roy Smith, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers,hombre}!phri!roy -or- roy@alanine.phri.nyu.edu
"The connector is the network"