Printers in the Convocation Center

The EECS printers in morton hall (printers hp181 and hp183 in rooms 181 and 183 resectively) are spooled via our ace machine. All output is recorded as to the number of pages printed. Each user has a weekly print quota. EECS majors have a quota of 200 pages per week. Non-eecs students have a quota of 50 pages. To avoid the problem of a user using up the entire quota with a single listing, the system attempts to limit output to 10 pages per listing. The user's entire quota (or amount remaining) can be used for a single output by printing to the printers hp282nc or hp183nc.

If a user's printer quota is used up for the week, it will be reset on Saturday. Until then, the user will be unable to print.

Note that it is possible to fool the accounting software that limits the output to 10 pages per listing. If you do this, it is your problem, and no adjustments will be made to your print quota.

To see your current print quota, look for your login id in the file

/var/account/printer_quota
on ace.

It is possible (unfortunately) to print more pages than your print quota would allow. When this happens, your print quota will be a negative number, and the nubmer of pages over your allotted print quota will be deducted from the next week's print quota. It is possible (and has happened) that a very large output ( > 200 pages) would print, and you would not be able to print for several weeks. This is the user's responsibility to see that paper is used in a responsible way.

HINTS

If a listing is too large to look at on-line, it is too large to print. DON'T PRINT IT

If you can't view file a file on-line because it has a lot of control characters in it, it will be garbage on the printer. DON'T PRINT IT

Printing out every piece of documentation that professors place on-line will use up your print quota fast. The documentation is on-line for a reason - to read it on-line.

If you print something, and it doesn't come out, find out why instead of printing it 4 or 5 times. If all of the copies DO come out, they will be deducted from your print quota.

Learn the commands to view the output queues (lpq and lpstat ) and the command to delete an output before it actually prints (lprm). If you delete an output before it prints, no deduction on your print quota is made.