Quick question regarding printers.

I'm looking to purchase a new (refurbished) laser printer for my apartment. I share it with five roommates, all of whom are technical people. I'd like to setup some sort of accounting so that I can figure out how many pages each person prints on a, say, monthly basis. This is complicated by the fact that between the 6 of us, there are well over a dozen machines, not including guest laptops.

So...

1) Do any of the major vendors' print servers include such functionality? How are the users differentiated? Username with a password login? IP? MAC? (Keep in mind that we may be considering a very old model - I'm looking to spend around $300 or so for a networked laser printer, preferably with duplex, so we may be talking about something as old as an HP 4 or 5.)

2) Would it be easier to use a semi-dedicated system as a print server, somehow grab statistics by user IP or MAC, and then code something myself that associated an IP/MAC with a user?

Thanks for any advice.
-Jason

Just FYI, to post a follow-up, I ended up setting up a separate LAN for the printers. I setup a CUPS server with NICS on both the main LAN and the printer LAN. I used a package called tea4cups (they want money for it, but it's available in a few RPM repositories) to put a hook in the CUPS processing system and spit some job info out to a script that sticks it in a MySQL database.