Remote Printing

What are the dangers of having a remote printer?
We have a main office in the city and our wharehouse in in the outer suburbs and daily we print our stocksheets and delivery runsheets via a modem to our printer in wharehouse so storeman can pick orders each day.
Approx 500 pages a day - 6 days a week.

Every week the printer the printer goes offline and im wondering if its being knocked offline by someone or there is a problem with network admin's side who work in the city office section.
There is no computer/monitor with remote printer....just modem and printer.

I know the guys in I.T are very smart and probably have most areas covered for the printer(e.g ports barred) so im just wondering how high is the danger for having it?

Kind of depends on the printer.. If it can only print the danger is someone printing a truckload of garbage. Some printers however are also faxes, scanners etc. Then the documents are sometimes stored on the printer itself and can be remotely accessed via a webinterface.

One thing pops to mind though, something that happened in the past to me. Every day at around 8 in the morning a server went off-line. After 15 min. or so it would come back up. Several days past and we couldn't find anything wrong with it. Turned out the cleaning lady used a wall socket that's normally connected to that server. She unplugged it to plug in her vacuum. DOH!

Hi,

Quote:

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There is no computer/monitor with remote printer....just modem and printer.

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That doesn't sound dangerous to me. Sometimes print servers can be a weak link, but not a printer on its own?

The biggest danger I have encountered with remote devices is that there is no-one on site who knows how to look after them

Do these outages happen at regular times and how long do they last?

Apart from SirDice's familiar cleaner example, could it be:

1. Someone using the modem with a laptop?
2. Someone doesn't know how to change paper/toner or whatever properly?
3. The ISP?

The Wolfman has never heard of a vulnerability affecting a printer that is only accessible through a modem, but just in case, search Securityfocus.com's vulnerability section (using the search bar in the top right corner of the page) and see if your printer model has any known vulnerabilities. If so, you may want to consider patching your printers firmware.