Table of Contents
This section covers some of the more advanced printer management tasks. Advanced printer management can be grouped into the following high-level concepts:
Activity monitoring
Encouraging appropriate use
Managing the addition of new printers
This section addresses these management areas and covers tools available in PaperCut NG to assist administrators.
PaperCut NG tracks all print queues local to the system by default. Local print queues are those that have been set up on the server running PaperCut NG with a local port, such as: a TCP/IP connection to a network printer, an LPR connection, or a printer attached locally via USB or LPT. Standard Windows print queues that are hosted on a different system, or “re-shared”, are not tracked (these queues may be tracked by setting up a secondary print server, see Chapter 14, Configuring Secondary Print Servers and Locally Attached Printers).
New print queues added to the system should show up automatically in PaperCut NG, however in some rare situations the printer may only show up after the first print job has been sent.
Under some situations it may not be desirable to track all printers. Some examples of why an administrator may choose not to monitor a printer include:
The printer is a “virtual printer” such as a PDF generator, FAX, or document management program.
The administrator may wish to offer free printing on a selected printer and not be concerned with monitoring (silent monitoring with a zero page cost will also achieve this).
The printer may not be supported by PaperCut NG and may need to be ignored.
The Print Provider component is responsible for locating and tracking the printers. To instruct it to ignore a printer:
Open the file [app_dir]\providers\print\win\print-provider.conf
in a
text editor such as Notepad.
Locate the line IgnorePrinters=
and enter the full name of the printer on
the right-hand-side of the equals line. For example:
IgnorePrinters=Office Printer
Note: This is the printer's locally assigned name and not the name of its network share.
If you have multiple printers to ignore, then separate the each printer name with a comma. For example:
IgnorePrinters=Office Printer,Copy Room Printer
Restart (stop then start) the PaperCut Print Provider
component
under
→ → →
If the printer data is no longer required for reporting purposes, log into PaperCut NG's admin interface and select the Printers section, then click on the printer to be removed and select Delete printer from the Actions list.
Test the changes by printing to the deleted printer and ensuring the printer does not
re-register itself in the system. It if does, verify the name assigned under the
IgnorePrinters=
setting is correct.
The list of monitored printers is configured when installing PaperCut NG. To change the list of
monitored printers, run the script at
/Applications/PaperCut NG/Control Printer Monitoring.command
. Please read the
script's instructions carefully and ensure that the Print Setup Utility is
closed/quit when running this script.
After running the script, print a test document (i.e. using a text editor or printing a web page from Safari).
The act of printing for the first time will register the printer with the primary server.
Log into PaperCut NG as admin
and verify that the printers are now listed under
the Printers section. Perform a test print on each printer and verify that the
jobs are tracked correctly.
At the technical level, Mac systems use the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS). PaperCut NG
tracks printing by integrating with CUPS. (For system administrators familiar with CUPS,
PaperCut NG integrates by wrapping or proxying the CUPS backend). The
Control Printer Monitoring.command
script simply edits the file
/etc/cups/printers.conf and prefixes the DeviceURI
with
papercut:
, enabling monitoring on the selected printer.
System administrators experienced with the terminal may prefer to edit the
printers.conf
file directly with a text editor. See
the section called “On Linux” for more details.
To delete a printer:
Double click on the Control Printer Monitoring.command
script.
Choose to disable monitoring on the printer(s) to delete.
If the printer data is no longer required for reporting purposes, log into PaperCut NG's admin interface and select the Printers section, then click on the printer to be removed and select Delete printer from the Actions list.
Test the changes by printing to the deleted printer and ensuring the printer does not
re-register itself in the system. It if does, verify that it is not being monitored using
Control Printer Monitoring.command
.
PaperCut NG tracks printing by integrating with the Common UNIX Printing System (CUPS), the printing system on Linux. For a printer to be tracked, CUPS needs to be told to route print jobs through PaperCut NG before printing.
To do this, the printers.conf
file must be edited. This can either be done
manually, or assisted via the configure-cups
script.
To use the script, run the script file at
[app-path]/providers/print/linux-*/configure-cups
. Please read the script's
instructions carefully to enable monitoring on the desired printers.
To edit the file manually:
Open your printers.conf
in a text editor such as
vim
. On most Linux distributions printers.conf
is
located at /etc/cups/printers.conf
.
Prepend papercut:
to the DeviceURI
of the
printers you wish to track. After the modification a DeviceURI
line
might look like:
DeviceURI papercut:ipp://1.2.3.4/printers/My_Printer
Restart CUPS in the way appropriate to your distribution. E.g.:
/etc/init.d/cupsys restart
Perform a test print on each printer. This will cause the printers to be registered. This
step is not required with the configure-cups
script, because the script
registers the printers automatically.
The printers should now be registered. Log into PaperCut NG as admin
and verify that the printers are now listed under the Printers section.
Verify that the test prints sent previously were tracked correctly.
To delete a printer:
Double click on the configure-cups
script (or manually edit
printers.conf
), and choose to disable monitoring on the printer(s) to
delete.
If the printer data is no longer required for reporting purposes, log into PaperCut NG's admin interface and select the Printers section, then click on the printer to be removed and select Delete printer from the Actions list.
Test the changes by printing to the deleted printer and ensuring the printer does not
re-register itself in the system. If it does, verify that it is not being monitored using
configure-cups
.
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