Hello,

I have a problem I hope someone here can give me some guidance on. I have been looking for ways to do this and so far have come up short.

My need is to keep logs of usage of several copiers for billing purposes. The copiers have a built in account code system, with a 999 code limit and will keep the counts, however we have about 12,000 active accounts. Not every account will have usage every month and not every copier needs every account. The last thing I want to have to do is manually update the copier account information every day.

The copiers can authenticate against NTLM (v1 and v2) and "Active Directory" I am told they will happily access LDAP or e-Directory (we are a Novell shop). I dont' want to authenticate users, I want to authenticate "Accounts". I have a MS SQL database that has the "Account information" and my thought was to set up a way to have an LDAP server access the M$ SQL DB (probably a view) to get authentication for the copier to allow the prints and keep the counts. Which I can then import weekly into the accounting system.

So the question is has anyone ever done something like this?

Anyone have any idea how best to go about accomplishing this?

I guess I could set up an LDAP server separately for the purpose, but it seems I should be able to consolidate things more than that, so that if the account is "Active" it is Authenticated to the copiers.

If this works well, I will be probably be moving to moving to phone authentication next.

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

3 months & no replies.

Did you solve your problem?

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I was not able to get LDAP to authenticate via MSSQL, and other conditions changed, so in the end I just added departments to the copiers and it is up so users to enter billable copies into our case management software, not as automated as I had wanted, but more versatile than other solutions.

Thanks for replying. If you need more help, please ask.