Printers Question

[mhermsen]

We are able to track our networked printers with lansweeper with no problem. The question I have is regarding printers setup locally to a computer. Is there a way to track those, and what machine/user they belong to. The issue we are running into is having an employee terminate and not knowing what equipment belows to them (ie computer, printer, monitor, etc). The computer we are able to track and keep track of, but the printers and monitors can easily be swapped out. Is there an easy way to keep track of this information within lansweeper? Primarily for the printers. The monitors I believe does a decent job of tracking within lansweeper (although I don't know how often it gets updated). If someone could help me out with this, I would greatly appreciate it.

[Hemoco]

Lansweeper only scans printers found in the Win32_Printer WMI class. You can manually query this class by running the command below on a client machine and opening the resulting lansweepertest.txt file. Only printers installed for the computer as a whole (not for specific users) are scanned.

c:\>wmic path win32_printer >lansweepertest.txt

While custom registry scanning is possible, you can only scan specific registry values: http://lansweeper.com/kb/18/report-based-on-registry-keys.html
Scanning all of a key's subkeys is not possible.

[abustraan]

thanks for the reply. I was actually hoping to scan the workstations to determine which drivers and/or copiers were installed on each workstation.

In checking the registry, there's an entry for the printers mapped from the network, for the user.

Is there a way to capture that in Lansweeper?

[Hemoco]

If you want to scan a network printer then you have to make sure that one of the following protocols is running on the printer: FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, JetDirect, SIP, SMTP, SNMP (SNMPv1, SNMPv2 or SNMPv3) or Telnet.

[abustraan]

I installed 6 new copiers and although they can use the old drivers, I'm working on upgrading the drivers. When I check lansweeper it doesn't list any network printers.

On my system for example, I have the 6 copiers installed as network printers, and none of them show up. I also have 3 other networked printer devices that don't show up either.

I augmented a script posted on another thread:

Select Top 1000000 tblAssets.AssetID,
tblAssets.AssetUnique,
tblAssets.Domain,
tblPrinters.Caption,
tblPrinters.Local,
tblPrinters.Network,
tblPrinters.Sharename,
tblPrinters.Lastchanged
From tblAssets
Inner Join tblPrinters On tblAssets.AssetID = tblPrinters.AssetID
Where tblPrinters.Network = '1'
Order By tblAssets.AssetUnique,
tblPrinters.Caption

and it shows 9 network devices from 3 other systems none of the devices found, represent any of the copiers.

In fact, after looking at those systems, those printers are installed as local printers with network ports.

Any thoughts?

[Hemoco]

mhermsen wrote:
Is there a way to track those, and what machine/user they belong to. The issue we are running into is having an employee terminate and not knowing what equipment belows to them (ie computer, printer, monitor, etc).

Local printers are listed on computer webpages under Config\Devices\Printer. Lansweeper does keep a history of this information, stored in the tblPrintershist database table, so you can review any changes that occurred.

We are eventually planning on making these kinds of computer "parts" (printers, monitors...) separate assets. The problem with this is finding a way to uniquely identify each part. For monitors, serial numbers cannot always be retrieved for instance.

mhermsen wrote:
although I don't know how often it gets updated

How often specific data gets updated depends on how you've configured your wait times, found in the Lansweeper 5.0 web console under Configuration\Scanning Setup\Item Wait Time.

[bob_11]

There are a few ways the monitor identification is easy as when ls scans it scans for the monitor serial under the hardware tab. The printer you would have to add as a custom comment if I'm understanding your question correctly. To make it faster you could use a batch file to run a wmic string to fined those printers on your network then either hand jam it in or use sqlcmd to import it in to a custom comment section with a custom action. Use wmi builder this will help you narrow down the wmi string you will want to use to get the printer info.