Do you know any way to have a copy of all documents printed through print queues of a Windows Server 2003 machine? I'd like to audit what people is printing.
Regards
You could just set the queue to keep printed documents.
EDIT:
If you want to 'move them' to another place then you will probably have to put some kind of different port monitor in place. You could use something like Redmon (or we have a Commercial product) that would write the data to file, and then route it to the actual printer.
There are other server based tools that could allow for this along with other tracking capabilities.
Related
I am receiving SAP broadcasts, which I can normally use and play using the standalone vlc application.
I have been asked to provide a dump of the same. I have 2 questions:
I dont clearly understand what exactly dump is
How can I obtain the same?
There are multiple types of dumps, so you might first find out, what kind of dump is meant. It could be a database dump, which is similar to a backup, but usually it's a memory dump.
A memory dump or crash dump is a copy of the application including its memory at a specific point in time. Usually you want to create a dump exactly at the time an application is crashing or hanging. The dump will then be helpful to find the cause of the problem.
There are many ways to obtain a dump. First, Windows might do that for you, when it asks "Send information to Microsoft". Second, you can create it using Task Manager. Right click a process and choose "Create dump file". Third, there are many tools out there, e.g. Process Explorer or ProcDump, which all have pros and cons and serve different purposes.
To suggest a tool for your specific case, we would need more information. Exact wording might matter in this situation.
Update
In your particular case it looks like SAP means Service Advertising Protocol, which is related to the network. A broadcast is a message which is sent to everybody.
You could capture that one with Wireshark, but you would need a lot of network knowledge to get the filters set up. In this case the term "dump" probably refers to a something similar to a database dump, because SAP uses tables to store lists of services.
I'm trying to build a virtual printer.
There are already some answers like this and this.
However my demand is more specific. I just want to create a virtual printer that can be added into the system and can be accessed from any application. On clicking print command, a dialog looks like a real printer pops out and generates a PDF on printing. Then some more actions, like pushing the PDF to my server, are performed.
Do I need to dig into Windows Driver Kit? Or is there any free SDK for this?
Thanks.
Not sure if this question is still relevant to you, but you'd probably want to think about something like this:
Use the WDK (Windows Driver Kit) to create a Unidrv UI plugin. This will allow you to specify UI during the print (for your printer dialogue). The reason why you'd want to show UI here is because it's one of the only printer driver components that runs in the user session (the same process as the printing application). The XPS pipeline and port monitor are both session 0.
If you want to stick to MS convention, you'll do the spool file to PDF conversion in the render filter of the XPS Filter pipeline (this is if you're using an XPSDrv driver). The filter pipeline is where you have the opportunity to modify the XPS spool data coming in and in the final filter, convert it to your output document type (PDF in your case).
To do post print processing, you might want to consider creating a port monitor (again with the WDK) and kicking off a new process to do the post print processing after the port monitor writes out the print output to disk.
Only problem with this approach is that you can't use port monitors in Version 4 drivers (this is the new type of driver in Windows 8). Version 3 drivers still work in Win 8, but I guess they'll be phased out eventually.
Sorry it's probably not very obvious, but as I say, it's a high level overview (and unfortunately driver development is still very complex beyond a simple print to file). Version 4 printer drivers are becoming a lot easier to develop, but unfortunately with the removal of port monitor support and other improvements, it makes it a lot harder to develop anything requiring post processing.
[DISCLAIMER: I'm associated with the Mako SDK R&D team]
I know you asked for a free SDK, unfortunately I don't know of anything that would be suitable, but I know our company offer a Virtual Printer Platform (SDK) which would be good for you (prints to PDF and supports post print processing). You can find more information at the Mako SDK website
Hope this helps a bit anyway. I know printer driver development can be very confusing at times!
After reading up and doing a lot of research, with the aim to setup up something like redmon and use the printer SDK, I have completed the project using this SDK: http://www.novapdf.com/pdf-sdk.html
This solution however will work with windows only.
[I am not affiliated with novaPDF]
I have investigated an OSX version, however this will be a different build, you can probably set something up using this method: http://www.jms1.net/osx-pdf-services.shtml [I have not yet tried this]
We have some computers on which we charge for printing documents. When a user prints, I would like to intercept the print job, prompt them for their username / password so I can charge their account, then allow the print job to continue through to the printer.
How can this be accomplished? Is it possible to write such a utility in .NET?
You really need to look at creating a Port Monitor for this. Far from simple. You could look at RedMon. BTW: Many printer vendors offer solutions to this which use codes that are embedded into the print stream (PCL/PS) and the data is collected and retained on the printer.
For example, Xerox has something called Standard Accounting. When enabled in the driver it embeds PJL codes like this:
#PJL COMMENT OID_ATT_ACCOUNTING_INFORMATION_AVP "XRX_USERID,xxxx";
Once the job has been printed the device makes reference to the user, number of pages etc. which can then be reported on.
The problem you will run into when doing this on the workstation / server is that detecting the number of pages printed can be difficult. If you are trying, for example, to charge by the page you might be able to parse the number of pages from the file, or run through a PCL or PS RIP and determine but if they have a flag for 2up or 4up on the page and that work is done by the printer and not the driver, you will charge the client for 4 pages when they really only printed 1. That is one of the many pitfalls.
I don't know if it sounds crazy, but here's the scenario -
I need to print a document over the internet. My pc ClientX initiates the process using the web browser to access a ServerY on the internet and the printer is connected to a ClientZ (may be yours).
1. The document is stored on ServerY.
2. ClientZ is purely a cliet; no IIS, no print server etc.
3. I have the specific details of ClientZ, IP, Port, etc.
4. It'll be completely a server side application (and no client-side on ClientZ) with ASP.NET & C#
- so, is it possible? If yes, please give some clue. Thanks advanced.
This is kind of to big of a question for SO but basically what you need to do is
upload files to the server -- trivial
do some stuff to figure out if they are allowed to print the document -- trivial to hard depending on scope
add items to a queue for printing and associate them with a user/session -- easy
render and print the document -- trivial to hard depending on scope
notify the user that the document has been printed
handling errors
the big unknowns here are scope, if this is for a school project you probably don't have to worry about billing or queue priority in step two. If its for a commercial product billing can be a significant subsystem in its self.
the difficulty in step 4 depends directly on what formats you are going to support as many formats are going to require document specific libraries or applications. There are also security considerations here if this is a commercial product since it isn't safe to try to render all types of files.
Notifications can be easy or hard depending on how you want to do it. You can post back to the html page, but depending on how long its going to take for a job to complete it might be nice to have an email option as well.
You also need to think about errors. What is going to happen when paper or toner runs out or when someone tries to print something on A4 paper? Someone has to be notified so that jobs don't just build up.
On the server I would run just the user interaction piece on the web and have a "print daemon" running as a service to manage getting the documents printed and monitoring their status. I would use WCF to do IPC between the two.
Within the print daemon you are going to need a set of components to print different kinds of documents. I would make one assembly per type (or cluster of types) and load them into your service as plugins using MEF.
sorry this is so general, but you are asking a pretty general and difficult to answer question.
I need to run an equipment audit and to do that I need to obtain the Windows PC, monitor etc. serial numbers.
So I faced with going to each PC and manually writing down the numbers.
Is there a way I can get this programmatically so each user can run a small program and email me the results?
If this information is anywhere, it'd be in WMI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Management_Instrumentation) - you could write a VBscript script to query this information and save it to a remote share on a server for example.
Generally no. If your computers are all Dell, though, you might be able to get some information (maybe the serial number?) for the PC itself.
The monitor, if it supports VESA EDID (DDC, EDID, EEDID), may also include a 32 bit serial number - which may or may not have any relation to the serial number printed on the monitor's label. You may be able to access this through the display driver - Windows has access to portions of it (to display monitor resolution and timing) so I expect the manufacturer/model/serial number is stashed somewhere as well.
However, making such a program that would work across all systems and monitors would likely be much more work than simply going to each station and recording it, unless all the systems have the same hardware.
Good luck!
-Adam
I am not quite sure if this is exactly what you want, but there is pay software made by DameWare that allows you to easily remote connect to other machines and get lots of information. I haven't used it much yet, but I think there is a way to make batch scripts so it can go pull information like that for you, or see what apps are installed on the machines. Even worse case though, you don't have to run to each machine. (I am assuming you mean SN like the MS product ID)
WMI is definitely the way to go. You can get quite a bit of useful audit information through that API.
Michael Baird appears to have written a VBS script to read the EDID information. The script reads and parses the monitor EDID information from the registry in order to retrieve asset information.
http://cwashington.netreach.net/depo/view.asp?Index=980&ScriptType=vbscript