Script to grab total pages printed from printers

[n3tw0rkadm1n1strat0r]

Does anyone know of a script that will grab the total pages printed from a printer?

 

[PaulTEG]

What printer? Does it have an on board OS? Does it interface with some host OS on a print server? Which register? (monthly, daily weekly, yearly, total)????

Give a little, it helps a lot ;-)

Paul
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Spend an hour a week on CPAN, helps cure all known programming ailments ;-)

 

[n3tw0rkadm1n1strat0r]

There are over 50 models of printers on the print server, most of them are HP's. I'm trying to get a total number of pages printed from each printer. The print server is windows 2003. I've got some other scripts but the problem with them is that it relys on the event log or the spooler. The event log can only hold so much information and it gets cleared out from time to time; the spooler resets itself after the print server is rebooted and clears out the total pages printed.

 

[PaulTEG]

Unless the printer is what you might call a 'serviceable' model, as in a service company can read off registers, the only real way to check would be poll the various printers through the event logs on a regular basis.

Each print job will have sufficient characteristcs, date, time , name etc so if you dump these into a database you could then run any reports on it

See here for pointers on reading the event log

Paul
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Spend an hour a week on CPAN, helps cure all known programming ailments ;-)

 

[n3tw0rkadm1n1strat0r]

Right I can read from the event log, but it does not contain everything since it gets cleared out from time to time. I found this, which looks like it telnet's into the printer and can get information...but I dont know how to do this, maybe you can help:

http://www.irongeek.com/i.php?page=security/networkprinterhacking

 

[n3tw0rkadm1n1strat0r]

It looks like this only works with PJL printers, pretty much all of ours are PCL.

 

[PaulTEG]

If you logon to the server every say 10-15 minutes (or whatever's a reasonable time frame, take a dump of the file, read the last record stored on the DB, and process only records newer than that, and you should be fine.

If your logs are cycling quicker than that, you need to allocate more disk space to your logs

Paul
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Spend an hour a week on CPAN, helps cure all known programming ailments ;-)