Printer gibberish

[Carmelchik]

Hey there everybody,

I'm having trouble with the printer in my office. It's shared by graduate students in my lab via our local network. Yesterday someone sent some kind of document which used about 200 pages of paper with some kind of gibberish. I'm charged by my department for every single page and obviously this is a lot of waste. I'm trying to find out which one of my students sent this wasteful print job and obviously when I asked them none admitted responsibility.

Is there a way to view the printer's history and see which machine sent this printjob? Alternatively, is there a way to check each single computer and pull out a history of their print jobs? I greatly appreciate your help.

 

[fdf]

Your problem is most likely accidental, not malicious. Whoever initiated the problem print may be unaware of it. Sounds like a job got sent to the printer and somehow the printer setup got out of synch with the format of the print content. Sending a rich text format to a laser printer in raw mode or vice-versa can generate some ugly results. This can sometimes be replicated by partially flushing the printer buffer in the middle of a print job.

Assuming the printer is accessed as a windows network printer, there is a printer separator page option in printers/properties/advanced that you might be able to do something with on a workstation by workstation basis.

If the jobs are coming in through the Unix lp spooler you might consider turning on banners.

Cost benefit on banner/separator pages would depend on the trade off between the cost of all those banner pages vs the benifits of identifying who printer what. Banners could also turned on selectively for suspects only.

Another Unix spooler approach would be to maintain a log of printer jobs by piping all print jobs thru a common shell which captures the time, date, user ID number of characters, number of lines, etc. >> [printer log name]. You'd have to put some thought into how to prevent your students from going around the script.