Chapter 7. Advanced Printer Management

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.

Adding and Removing/Deleting/Ignoring Printers

On Windows

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 15, 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:

On the computer system running the print provider component 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
                            
```
Wildcard expressions can also be used. Use '*' to ignore any span of characters, and '?' to ignore a single character. For example, to ignore any printers which start with the phrase Copy Room:
```
            IgnorePrinters=Copy Room*
                            
```
Restart (stop then start) the PaperCut Print Provider component under Start → Control Panel → Administrative Tools → Services
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.

On Mac

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.

Note

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.

On Linux

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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