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Printer Management, Diagnostics and Configuration

For an Adobe Acrobat format of Hewlett-Packards printer properties, click here.

Caption: When the HP printer icon is clicked, only basic information is displayed. The user would need to run the vendors application (in this case JetAdmin) to get any sort of useful information.

To ease the burden, when managing a directly attached printer, it's best to use the vendors supplied management tool. HP printers use JetAdmin and Web JetAdmin (see figure Five).

For an Adobe Acrobat format of Web JetAdmin, click here.

Caption: HP's web management interface, Web JetAdmin runs as a stand-alone HTTP server which is supported on various platforms including NT. Web JetAdmin uses SNMP over IP or IPX to communicate with the HP network printers.

Lexmark printers use MarkVision; Canon printers, NetSpot. All of these utilities provide valuable information regarding the configuration and status of printers on the network. While some of the vendors claim that their utilities can manage other vendors' printers, our testing found that this is not the case.

Many new printers, like other network devices, ship with Web-based management utilities. For the most part, these utilities are not as robust or as fast as their native OS counterparts like HP's JetAdmin. There are two main design methods for web-based printer management that printer vendors have developed (See Figure Six).

Caption: Web-based printer management affords a number of solutions, which tie existing enterprise Web technologies to printer hardware and printer management utilities.

The first is to deploy an HTTP server on the printer itself, which utilizes the printer's embedded network controller. Thus, to manage the printer all you need to do is point your Web browser at the IP address or host name of the printer. Tektronix supports this type of printer administration. The advantage of printer-based Web management products is that you don't have to spend much time configuring the printer or installing additional software. The disadvantage is that you have to keep track of all printer host names, if you have a large number of these printers on your network. There is no primary site that you can visit to see a listing of all the printers on the network, unless you build it yourself.

The alternative method that vendors, including HP, have employed is to utilize a single-server approach. With this technique, you install a Web server, a proprietary one in the case of HP, which is the central point of administration. By pointing your browser at this Web server, you can get a list of all the printers on the network. In the case of the HP solution, the Web server uses a CGI application that communicates to all the printers on the network via SNMP, which is exactly the same method used by the native OS JetAdmin product. The HP Web-based JetAdmin works well, but its interface is not as solid as that of the native client JetAdmin tool.

For administrators who need to monitor the status of all printers on a network and do not want to use multiple consoles, Xerox's PrinterMap is a good solution (See Figure Seven).

For an Adobe Acrobat format of Xerox's PrinterMap, click here.

Caption: Xerox's PrinterMap application is a printer management utility that allows users to graphically represent their printers In theory, PrinterMap works similarly to HP OpenView.

In effect, PrinterMap is a Windows-based printer management console. PrinterMap uses SNMP and the Printer MIB to gather statistics and status of the printers. But, because each printer vendor utilizes some proprietary MIB extensions and protocols, PrinterMap is not able to deliver the level of detail that the vendor's own management console can provide. However, you can configure PrinterMap to launch the vendor's application when you double-click the icon representing the printer.