Finding installed Network Printers
I've been trying to figure out how to find the installed network printers on a computer, but I'm only seeing the ability to find [locally installed] printers which doesn't seem to find a printer if it was installed from a print server...
How do I go about getting that information back?
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Well, I sort of found a way to separate the printers by setting a collection of computers that have a hardware ID of 'printer' and a name that reference the print server, but I was hoping there would be a cleaner way. It doesn't seem to bring back all of the systems that have a printer installed, but it did bring back most of them...
Any reason PDQ Inventory doesn't detect installed printers on a workstation when it is added FROM a print server? Technically it is a local driver install...
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AH!!!! Haha that would make sense as to why they aren't coming back as I was expecting.
Thanks for your help! Your tool is friggin' awesome! I'm playing around with the free version and working on building a bunch of use case scenarios so that I can convince my boss to buy both PDQ Inventory and PDQ Deploy!
:)
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You are just gonna love me! I have spent the past week messing with detecting and adding TCP/IP printers. I found where the ports live in the registry, so we can have some fun detecting IP printers (whether by IP or hostname).
set up a scan profile that scans the registry keys starting in
HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Monitors\Standard TCP/IP Port\Ports
and get all subkeys.
Create a dynamic collection
match: Registry - Value Name - Contains - HostName
match: Registry - Value - Matches Expression - 'regular expression matching your ports'
You can even select multiple expressions to match (IP range, host name similarities, etc...)
I have been able to create a dynamic collection to let me know ports that exist as IP addresses and push hostname updates to them. I also created a report that lets me see the IP based printers installed on everyone's system.
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edit: Unfortunately that doesn't seem to work correctly either since it only applies to the user that is logged into the machine. I think this goes back to what Shane said about Windows 7 not reporting on this feature...
I'm working on some PowerShell scripts to [hopefully] help out with this problem...
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Any update on this? Getting list of network printers installed on the user's PC will be very useful.
In Powershell, there's a "Get-Printer" command that lists all printers installed on the computer. Don't want to mess up PDQ Inventory - but I saw there's a "TOOLS" section. Can this Get-Printer PS command be added in the Tools library/menu and ran as part of the scan/collection?
Thanks.
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