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Question

Determine If Staff Have Printers That They Shouldn't

  • July 30, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 38 views
F
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Hey!

My institution has completely removed the option for building printers for teachers besides the district Xerox machines. So every computer gets "Papercut" pushed down to it. However, I want to check to see if there was a way that I can determine if a teacher has installed a computer through ip (i.e a printer that they shouldn't have).

I tried a smart group with "Printer is 'not like' Papercut" but that just returns computers who don't have Papercut yet. Even if a user has a network printer on their device they will not show up since they have paper cut.

We have multiple different IPs across the district so there is no way to just check if they have a single IP address.

Just wondering if there was a way to do this?

Thanks!

    3 replies

    mkolb
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    • mkolb
    • Contributor
    • July 30, 2018

    You could try an extension attribute, like it was discussed here

    If you should only have one printer on every client you could use this to check for clients with more than one printer.

    When you have your list you can see the mapped printers in the client's Inventory entry.

    An alternative idea would be the "Rambo way". Run a script on all clients which deletes ALL printers, just adds the one printer they should have and maybe removes the user from the lpadmin group to prevent them from adding new printers again...

    J
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    • joshuasee
    • Valued Contributor
    • July 30, 2018

    I would note the Rambo way carries risks for any portable machines with home printers or oddballs like those assigned check or badge printers. A policy or EA would likely be more thorough than gleaning the information from inventory. Something like lpstat -v | grep -v PaperCutQueueName .

    F
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    • ferriterj1
    • Author
    • Contributor
    • July 30, 2018

    Yeah that's what I was thinking about with the Rambo way. We didn't allow them to add any printers but got a lot of complaints because they want to add their home printers.

    I just added the "number of printers" EA and that seems like it would work just fine. It found the # of printers on my machine just fine so I'm just going to have a smart group that see if a number of printers is not 1 and add them to the group.

    I wish there was a way to see if it was a home printer or not but I doubt there is an EA or way to script that.

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