title: How CUPS printer accounting works?
body: <p>About cups, from the book UNIX and Linux System Administration:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>If someone else adds a printer and one or more CUPS servers running on
    the network know about it, your CUPS server will learn of its
    existence. You don’t have to explicitly add the printer to the local
    inventory or copy PPDs to your machine. It’s magic.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>So, to make everyone at the same network (192.168.0.0/24) learn about my configured printers, I need this configuration:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;Location /&gt;
  Order Deny,Allow
  Deny From All
  Allow From 127.0.0.1
  Allow From 192.168.0.0
  &lt;/Location&gt;
  
  BrowseAddress 192.168.0.255:631
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And to implement printer accounting:</p>
  
  <pre><code>lpadmin -p printer -o job-quota-period=604800 -o job-page-limit=100
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In this example, theoretically, any user at network 192.168.0.0/24 can print 100 pages per week. But my problem is that I can't find anywhere how CUPS keeps track of printer utilization by users. I can't understand how CUPS can implement printer accounting without any authentication mechanism.</p>