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In my organization we have two guys dealing with different aspects of our printers.
One is the helpdesk team leader who's responsible (among other related things) for updating the list of printers and there details, and the other is the field technician who's responsible for physically handling them (fixing, replacing, etc.).
Unfortunately, they don't cooperate well and sometimes the technician replaces a printer without updating the helpdesk team leader (and thus the list is outdated).

Is there a way to block the relevant print queue on the print server (Windows 2008) when the physical printer has changed (even with a printer of the same series)?
Alternatively, is there a way to be alerted to such a change?

EliadTech
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  • Switch port MAC filtering? Not a very elegant solution, I know. – BlueCompute Jul 16 '14 at 11:27
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    Hmm... asking for a technical solution to a people problem. Perhaps the answer is to get these two together and iron this out, then put a procedure in place and make them follow it. – joeqwerty Jul 16 '14 at 14:00
  • @BlueCompute Not possible, since not all printers are connected to a manageable switch. – EliadTech Jul 16 '14 at 19:14
  • @joeqwerty Well, you're absolutely right that the finer solution is education, but I can't guarantee it'll be mistake free. – EliadTech Jul 16 '14 at 19:16
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    Assuming all your properties are filled in correctly, SNMP might be a simple automated way saving to a spreadsheet/db. Only thing you would need your team leader to do, is verify the content regularly. – Cold T Jul 21 '14 at 19:35

2 Answers2

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On any Windows box you can do arp -a from a command prompt, you could create a script that runs once every x hours or days, parses the output and if a Mac changed it creates a firewall rule to block that IP or even delete the printer.

Firewall: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771920(v=ws.10).aspx

Printers: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc782930(v=ws.10).aspx

George
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I believe this is a job for network inventory software. Your printers are working via print servers and thus I suppose they are network printers with assigned IP address. Then you can get alerts when printers MAC address change. Unfortunately though I can imagine how to code such an application, I have no practical experience with any such existing software.

Take look at this, it does a lot more but you may find something more suitable yourself:

HP Web Jetadmin http://www.hp.com/united-states/web-jetadmin/index_f.html

http://www.spiceworks.com/free-pc-network-inventory-software/

http://www.printeradmin.com/print-management-software.htm

Actually it would not be very difficult to code such an application: you will have to list all printers on printserver, track their MAC addresses and raise alarm (e.g. by e-mail) when MAC address changes.

If you use this script as a base:

http://www.michelstevelmans.com/powershell-print-server-inventory-script/

and then you add Get MAC from IP like this:

http://www.neolisk.com/techblog/powershell-getmacaddressofanyremoteip

you should get list of printers with their respective MAC addresses. If you compare 2 CSV files you get the changes and you can process them further - e.g. remove the printer from print server.

There is also an answer with code on this server that might be interesting:

Powershell scan for network attached printers

Without doing any scripting I doubt it is possible in Windows Server.

Community
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Vojtěch Dohnal
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