[bond1973]

So...I work at a school district. Four schools, 1 SAU department. We have networked (2003 AD) laser printers throughout. They are all either HP Laserjets or Lexmark (C532/534 or C780/782). Now all of these have built-in web consoles and will show you how much toner is left (whether black or multi-color). Pretty standard really.

What I would like is the ability to go to one browser page (internal network) to see the toner levels for all printers in the district. I would think this would be possible in some way, though I'm not a programmer by any means (unfortunately, though I want to learn damnit).

Any thoughts on this? Does it already exist? I get a request for Cyan for MEM_OFFICE_COLOR...well I'd like to hit one page (instead of logging into each individual printer) and see ALL the printers in that school to see if I should bring something for another printer as well. Just think it would be handy really.

Thanks for your time if you made it this far....
Rick

[whaffenden]

Hi Rick,

I know this is the script request section but i can give you a few tips that may help.

I would construct a database table containing all of the URLs to the individual printer web interfaces, so that you can easily add and remove printers at a later stage.

You would also have to find out whether the web interfaces have an API (application programming interface), which would allow you to easily program against them. If they don't then you would need to find out how easy it would be to strip out the rendered HTML output containing the information you need.

Then you would need to build a web application that would in turn connect to each of the printer web interfaces and extract the relevant information, which can be collated and displayed on the web app.

The only problem you may find, is that depending on how many printers there are, it would become quite slow to process all of the data. To overcome this you could run a background app or windows service that would do this process for you and would update a single database, then you're web app just sits on top of that. Obviously giving you a slight delay on the web app depending on the frequency of the background process.

I hope this helps in some way.

Thanks,
Wayne

[bond1973]

Wow...I need an aspirin now. ;-) Wayne...thank you very much for the post. At this point in time, I'm know no programming. I do up batch file scripts for work to perform tasks...that's about it. Back in college I took some Visual Basic for Applications (Excel, Access) classes, but haven't touched it since college (1999'ish). I'd love to start learning, and maybe this is the kick in the arse I need to do so. At the very least...your post has me thinking and yearning to learn. Thanks man.

I know that one thing I have to figure out is how to pull the info from the printer that it's already supplying for its own console. Maybe I'll start there.

Take Care
Rick

[whaffenden]

Hi Rick,

I'm glad that helped in some form or another. You've got me interested now, after a bit of research i've found a few interesting things that should help you out.

Firstly, it seems that you can communicate with devices using the SNMP (simple network management protocol) protocol Simple Network Management Protocol - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, especially printers. This seems the better way to go, cause you won't need to deduce the web interface!

You call commands using OIDs (object identifiers) and then get the relevant data back. I've found this website HP-LASERJET-COMMON-MIB SNMP MIB for the HP LaserJet OIDs and this website LEXMARK-PVT-MIB SNMP MIB for the Lexmark OIDs.

Finally, this website Cacti: The Complete RRDTool-based Graphing Solution has a free open source PHP web-based application for partly doing what you hope to achieve. They have support forums and documentation etc, which all seem pretty good. This project being web-based sounds like what you need, having that the base code is already in place, you may just need to create a web page based on top of this code, using the above OIDs within you're code.

I still believe you will benefit from storing all of the printer URLs within a simple database table, i recommend using the free MySQL engine as the Cacti project requires this to run anyways.

I hope this gets you somewhere, sounds like an interesting project! Good luck!

Wayne