Network printer

[lowtone]

Here at work we have an hp 8550 color printer on the network. many people print to this, recently people have been printing large pictures and leaving them there. my boss asked me to find out who has been doing this. the problem i have is that i can only see who is printing as it is done not after is there something that will capture all the print requests .?

[blankmeyer]

I dont know if this will help, but in our office we have an HP4500 color printer on the network. We also use Backup Exec as our backup utility. I have found that I can get a history report out of backup Exec that lists printjobs and what user sent them to the printer. Backup Exec was setup to the default options. That's how we find out who printed what on our network.

[a_420_hacker_24]

well What I like to do is ...most new printers have web servers that you can log onto and set configurations and stuff.If you go to http://<printer ip> and from there you can get info on logs and the print spooler.

[bighabu]

Depending on the network you can have it print banner pages that denotes the username that is associated with the print job.

[shkuey]

Are people printing directly to the printer through TCP/IP or DLC? Are they printing through a print server?

If you're using a print server, it should be able to be configured to log print jobs. Windows NT and 2k print servers dump all that information in the security log by default. If you have people printing directly to the printer, well, it would have to be advanced enough to keep it's own logs I suppose.

[roswell1329]

Originally posted here by shkuey
Are people printing directly to the printer through TCP/IP or DLC? Are they printing through a print server?

If you're using a print server, it should be able to be configured to log print jobs. Windows NT and 2k print servers dump all that information in the security log by default. If you have people printing directly to the printer, well, it would have to be advanced enough to keep it's own logs I suppose.

This is the same for most unix print hubs as well. You should be able to grep through the lp logs to find who is sending what.

[lowtone]

It does not keep logs and they print directly to it.

[Condor]

Set up auditing is the onlu solution I can come up with if you are using Win2K. Than once you find out who the persons responsible are, lay the smack down.

[str34m3r]

If the printer doesn't keep it's own logs, then you might want to try recording the network traffic to the printer with a computer on the same segment. All you would have to do is set up tcpdump or windump to listen for traffic on the printer port (9100 if you're using jetdirect or 161 if you're using SNMP). Then, whenever you have a question about a particular print job, you just look back through the traffic. Large pictures like the ones you described should be easy to spot among the other print traffic because the number of packets required for images is so much larger than the number of packets for a normal print job. It's not the prettiest implementation, but if your printer doesn't log, you don't have many other options.