Printer Authentication

[bizh0p]

Just a quick question, I am looking for a way to do printing authentication (if possible). I would like to be able when people are sending a print job to a networked printer that this user is prompted for a user name and pasword. I have AD setup and functioning on a windows 2000 server environment and windows 2000 professional computers, and I do have access restricted to only users that are allowed to print. I am mounting these network printers via a script at login. The users need to have the printing functionality, but I would like to have a way to secure this a little more to reduce paper and toner waste. I have read other posts on the NET about others looking for this type of authentication as well. If anyone has come across such software and used/tested this I would appreciate any feed back.

Thanks,

Biz

 

[Grimmda]

Well here's my understanding:

So your users are already authenticated into the domain...
And whey they go to print you want another ID/Password box to pop up... to reduce paper waste?

If all of those said users will have inherent rights to print anyway, will will agrivating them with another login prompt solve to reduce paper waste?

Are you hoping that if it's not a crucial print job then they won't be prone to logging into the printer to print that, somewhat as a nagging reminder to facilitate them not printing that job?

If that's the case, that's a strange reason to do something like that as a system administrator. The issue with finding a way to get that to work is that either a person will have rights to the printer or not.
If they do through their network login then it will handshake the access to the printer as well and allow them to print. (Provided you have the necessary access rights setup for who has access to print).

The only way I could think of doing this is to (and it seems pretty round-about way of doing it) take off the access rights and create a "Print ID" that is a seperate account the users will have to log into each time they want to print. And then you notify the users somehow of this printing ID, but that sounds like it's going to cause more problems then it's worth.

If you want to reduce paper waste I'd find another way to go about doing this.

 

[Phoenix86]

Restrict the access to the people who need to print to it. If they are wasting paper beyond that, it's a management issue between the employee.

I don't think an additional login would give you any benefit beyond restricting the users who can print. It'll just piss your users off, and make them lock out their accounts.

From the users point of view, why would an additional login make me print less? Unless your counting on me being irritated every time I print, so I'll do it less, and that just sounds asinine.

 

[bizh0p]

This is in a school environment and I was looking for a way to detour students from wasting paper and toner for printing issues other than what is related to the educational curriculum. I was looking into the possibility of having a student print and then be prompted via username and password which a class monitor could then enter to either allow or disallow.

 

[Phoenix86]

Well, that makes more sense... Why not restrict all students from the printer and have the teacher submit the job under their ID (on their machine)?

 

[bizh0p]

I had also brought that up with the staff here,,and there wasnt much agreement on their part to have 25 students emailing them with reports and homework which needed to be printed, especially when they are all in a lab. Any way, I did find software which may handle this for our school. Equitrac.com has this functionality built into their software which we can assign accounts for students and then track printing. This will ask for a userid before printing that a lab monitor can then type in and will deter students from sneaking around and printing in unsupervised situations. Thanks for the responses however.

Biz

 

[Direwolf20]

Students are smart and sneaky . Keep your eyes on them.

I was one of those kids in HS where the sysadmin knew my name. He was pretty cool with me though, cause he knew I was only circumventing his security to listen to my CD's or MP3's, visit websites, and do my own little thing. I didn't do anything malicious, nor did I ever cause him trouble, i even helped him solve a couple problems on occaision. A couple years later when I returned to visit, he introduced me as his "prodigy" student, which was kind of embarrassing but a nice thing to say none the less.

Anyway, one day he got an assistant, some female teacher who got signed up for teaching some programming classes and was gonna help him be a sysadmin. She saw me doing my stuff one day and was like "How'd you get into that? You aren't supposed to be in there, don't do that!". She got all pissy with me and started telling me how if she sees me doing it again I'd be in trouble, and I shrugged her off. Her husband happened to belong to a business association that my father also belonged to, and I remember her coming to me a couple days later, and saying "Guess who my husband is playing golf with today...your dad". Kind of a smug way of saying "I could get you in trouble with daddy if I wanted to". I blew her off again and basically said (in so many words), "Listen, your boss, the sysadmin, doesn't give me any trouble because he knows that I know my stuff, and I don't use it in a malicious way. I could use it in a malicious way, but I don't. (Me saying :if you wanna threaten me, we can both play that game). I'm a harmless person, and nothing gets broken, not to mention I've helped him solve problems on multiple occaisions, and he's come to me asking for help. So why don't you stop acting smug and all-powerful and get off my back".

She didn't bother me anymore.

There was a point to this story, or maybe I just felt like typing for a bit. I forget. Oh yea, kids find ways around things hehe.

 

[Phoenix86]

I had also brought that up with the staff here,,and there wasnt much agreement on their part to have 25 students emailing them with reports and homework which needed to be printed, especially when they are all in a lab

If they don't want to print them, why would they want to authorize the print jobs?

Open e-mail, click print button
Open auth. request, click OK to print.

One is free, one will cost you $$. Both are the same.

Also, if your going to lock down the printers, don't forget direct access printing to the IP. Which will bypass your network authentication and request/approve print software.

 

[bizh0p]

Just another update for this forum,, I have found another program called pcounter, formerly known as Pcontrol. If anyone is interested. I think the cost of pcounter as significantly cheaper than the equitrac I had posted earlier. When I contacted Equitrac the initianl quote was around $2000 for the base and then 795 for the print server and another 795 for 100 nodes to run on the client machine. I believe the pcounter is around 500 if anyone is interested.

Biz.