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To be safe, I checked the serverfault guidelines, and I think this question falls under management of 3rd party platforms or administration of networks. I'm sure I'm not the only sysadmin with this question!

On our network, we have about 15 large MFP/Copy machines. I'd like to programatically pull their Account Track data (per user code print counts) and I'm hitting some walls.

  • SNMP only provides aggregate data (total print count for the machine)
  • No SSH access
  • Only a web interface is available (that I know of)

The web interface offers a csv file as a download with account track data, which is pretty good. But I'd love to automate the steps of getting that CSV in the first place.

Is there a way to grab this data? I recognize that the answer may involve scraping the data from the web interface through some type of scripting.

SteadH
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    Can't you point `curl` or `wget` to this CSV file? If necessary, you can use two or more `curl` calls to initiate a session first (login) and download the file afterwards if the login is not HTTP auth. – Sven Jan 20 '15 at 16:17
  • Interesting idea! I might dig into that further as to how to pass login credentials to their system. – SteadH Jan 20 '15 at 19:32
  • Do not buy from konika : I have never ever in my life a company making such an obscursification!!!! – MUY Belgium Aug 23 '17 at 14:00

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Would love for this to be a comment - if only I had the rep.

Would love even more for this to be a private message but apparently stackexchange doesn't and will not ever do those.

SteadH: Wondering if you had any luck with this? I'm trying to do the same thing myself. I've used the tamperdata firefox plugin to see what happens during a login process (i.e. what page is loaded with what POST data) and tried to replicate the process using:

A standalone wget binary with --save-cookies, --keep-session-cookies options and providing the POST data with the flag --post-data.

The python requests module with session objects.

Going straight from ip.addr.ip.addr/wcd/ulogin.cgi to /wcd/system.xml gives an auth error - I've tried loading the intermediary /wcd/proglog url but that doesn't seem to make any difference. There's also some javascript in the intermediary page that appears to set two new bits of cookie data, tried manually adding them with python requests and then requesting the system.xml page but no dice there either.

Our MFP is a minolta C360 - but I'm pretty sure the web interface is stock standard across their entire range.

Blair
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  • Hi Blair! Unfortunatelly... no. I hit the same road blocks that you did. Right now I'm considering two different routes: Using AutoHotKey to program a silly little macro-like script to do my clicks for me, or using the Konica Minolta Data Admin tools to do this. Data Admin can pull and export the numbers, just like the web interface, but it feels a bit less clunky. I hope this helps! – SteadH Mar 24 '15 at 02:07
  • OK, where can be found an expemple of such a stand alone binary? – MUY Belgium Aug 23 '17 at 14:03