Computing Services tackles printing

Campus printing is a recurring frustration for students. It’s not uncommon to see printer queues longer than a six-year-old’s Christmas list.

Print jobs get lost, paper jams hold up queues, and students use up more and more reams of paper each year. The problem is so complex that no one really knows how to solve it yet.

However, Computing Services has now committed to assessing the campus printing system’s problems. Computing Services has started the Printing Discovery Project, which aims to determine what students’ complaints with printing are and to assess possible solutions.

According to Suzanne Kafantaris, a user analyst in the User Outreach and Analysis group, the amount of money spent on campus printing has risen in the past two years.

“Cluster managers were telling us that they were throwing away half of the stuff that printed,” said Kafantaris. “If students knew that half of the paper being printed is being thrown away, I think they would be really concerned.”

The Printing Discovery Project has been gathering input on printing through several student groups. Project members held a focus group with cluster managers in September. In early October, members held another focus group, consisting of students who were contacted through different academic departments by e-mail. Computing Services also spoke with representatives from Senate’s Campus Life committee regarding printing issues.

“Something we’ve heard a lot is that people don’t know how to cancel print jobs,” said Kafantaris.

Students in October’s student focus group reported printing a great deal of material from Blackboard, including lengthy documents and even entire textbook chapters.

“Some students have voiced that they would like to get printouts of lectures from the professor during class rather than having to go to Blackboard and print them out,” said Jack Wu, a sophomore in computer science and a Student Senator who spoke with Computing Services. “I think that is a great idea because the burden of printing gets shifted from cluster printing to department printing.”

As part of the effort to determine how students use the printers, Computing Services began logging data from the printers in September. This will allow the Printing Discovery Project to assess which clusters are being used the most, when the peak use times are, what files are printed the most often, and other similar statistics.

The data recorded include the name of the file being printed, the student’s username and IP address, and the time of the print job, according to Alex Lang, a user analyst in the User Outreach and Analysis group.

“The top 20 percent of [printer users] printed 65 percent of the printing,” said Lang, who added that Microsoft Word files are the most commonly printed files. However, the data may have some gaps from when the logging software temporarily stopped working due to glitches, and cannot yet be used to draw representative conclusions about student printing.

According to William Beegle, a technical services consultant in Computing Services, there is a pause of less than five seconds in between print jobs for the logging software to record data. “However, because of the logging, we don’t send the next job to the printer until we’ve received the accounting information from the current job,” wrote Beegle in an e-mail. This may cause printers to process jobs less efficiently.

At the beginning of this semester, students encountered more problems than usual due to several changes in the printing system.

This semester, Computing Services instituted a new policy that removed students’ ability to print to campus printers from dorms and off-campus apartments. This was done in an attempt to reduce printing waste, since it was believed that many students printed from their dorms and then forgot to pick up the printouts. However, based on talks with cluster managers and other students, Computing Services has found that the policy has not seemed to reduce printing waste.

Wu felt that the restriction of printing to campus clusters was a problem.

“The convenience of being able to print from my room is a great time saver,” he said. “Clusters are mainly used for ‘teaching purposes,’ with the exception of the clusters in the dorms, so at many times the clusters are full or not open for walking in.”

The printing process for Windows cluster computers was altered this semester. In order to make it easier to manage printer configurations in Windows, the computers now first send the print job to a separate computer with a distribution (DIST) queue, which then forwards the print job to the appropriate printer.

However, early in the semester, users noticed that print jobs from Windows computers sometimes seemed to disappear or get stuck in the DIST queue. According to Mike Kelleher, a field consultant for Computing Services, this occurred because all of the printers were converted to a different spooler software over the summer, and the software (an open-source product called LPRng) had a bug that resulted in slowdowns in the print queues. The bug was later fixed, but while it remained, Windows print jobs got stuck or delayed in the DIST queue.

“We got into a situation where people were printing to the DIST queues faster than jobs could get cleared to the UNIX spoolers,” wrote Kelleher. The buggy spooler software sometimes caused jobs to time out and be discarded, confusing users, who would then sometimes print to multiple printers.

Computing Services plans to conduct a campus-wide sampled survey of students in mid-November. This survey is intended to provide a better picture of how students use campus printers and what their needs are.

Given the currently problematic state of printing, some major changes will have to be made, and may involve restrictions on printing.

“Quotas are probably going to be the way we go,” said Kafantaris. She stressed, however, that they are not yet making decisions on what course to take, and there are a number of possible options.

In order to implement quotas, the printers would have to be switched to an authenticated printing system in which users need to verify their identity to be able to print.

With authenticated printing, Computing Services could place a quota on the number of pages a student is allowed to print, or charge money for pages printed in excess of the quota. Authenticated printing might also allow Computing Services to restore the ability to print from dorms.

According to the current schedule for the Printing Discovery Project, the group plans to choose a solution in January 2004.

Editor’s Note: John Davin participated in one of the printing focus groups.