How can I best uniquely identify which user sends a print ..

Consider a campus environment where users supply their own computers,
which may be of differing operating systems. The users may print to a
CUPS print server on the network and retrieve their job by swiping their
ID card and selecting the job from the list.
The trick is that I want only their jobs show in the list, and I want to
limit the custom software installed on the user computer to a PPD.
I can see a good deal of information about the incoming job from the
network, but this is not always enough to guarantee that I can identify
the specific user. For instance, while I can identify a specific
computer (by mac address), some computers may be shared, and there is no
validation that login names are unique.
I would like to have a user have the option of entering a user ID in the
print dialog box and have this passed to the print queue (as a comment).
However, it seems that (a) a PPD only allows me to select from
previously defined choices, not input a string, and (b) using edited
PPDs to customize dialog boxes seems depreciated if I correctly
interpret my scanty Apple documentation.

Does anyone have a suggestion, or pointer in a promising direction?

Gary,

When I travel and work out of a hotel, sometimes I need to print to one of
the hotel's networked printer.

There is a web based service many of them use at www.printeron.com

Don't know if this would help or be too cumbersome?


On 12/15/07 4:16 PM, in article
garycarroll-5308E8.19165115122007.RemoveThis@news.charter.net, "Gary Carroll"
<garycarroll.RemoveThis@nospamcharter.net> wrote:

> Consider a campus environment where users supply their own computers,
> which may be of differing operating systems. The users may print to a
> CUPS print server on the network and retrieve their job by swiping their
> ID card and selecting the job from the list.
> The trick is that I want only their jobs show in the list, and I want to
> limit the custom software installed on the user computer to a PPD.
> I can see a good deal of information about the incoming job from the
> network, but this is not always enough to guarantee that I can identify
> the specific user. For instance, while I can identify a specific
> computer (by mac address), some computers may be shared, and there is no
> validation that login names are unique.
> I would like to have a user have the option of entering a user ID in the
> print dialog box and have this passed to the print queue (as a comment).
> However, it seems that (a) a PPD only allows me to select from
> previously defined choices, not input a string, and (b) using edited
> PPDs to customize dialog boxes seems depreciated if I correctly
> interpret my scanty Apple documentation.
>
> Does anyone have a suggestion, or pointer in a promising direction?