Password for Printer

[Valuater]

I searched everywhere in all forums and could not find any help. I did find 1 thread about PrintLock and that is the idea of what I am looking for. BUT... They want to be paid each month.

printlock...  http://www.printerpassword.com/

I have an internet cafe and the users can print on black and white... but I want to have a password for the color printer. 10 users max,

Has anyone already written something like this in Autoit??

 

Thanks,

Valuater

[JLogan3o13]

Looking at that product, it appears that you install it on a single PC, basically to keep the kids from printing in color. I am guessing it intercepts print requests and then flashes its pop up.

In your situation, how are users connecting to the printers? Are they stand alone devices that users can connect to over wifi? Or are you sharing them out to the Everyone group from a central print server?

[ViciousXUSMC]

I know with our bigger business class printers we have features like secure print and account authentication that lets us do similar.

Just thinking outside the box, once I created a script that reads a folder and any PDF files that are scanned into it were processed and moved.

 

You could create a printer "server" with two shares one for color one for B&W and only give client computers print to PDF features and have the PDF's move to your share/server for further processing where you can control what gets printed.

 

Out of the box sounds kind of messy but maybe it could be automated in some fancy ways to make it work pretty well.

[jguinch]

@Valuater ;

what is the model of your color printer ?
Some printers allow you to send PDF files with FTP. So an idea is to use PDFCreator (declare a PDFCreator printer called "Color Printer")  and configure Autosave to generate a PDF File and use the Action feature to run an AutoIt script after the PDF creation. The AutoIt script could ask for a password, and then send the PDF file to the printer.

It's fetched, but should work.

Note a good idea finally

 

Edited July 21, 2016 by jguinch

[jguinch]

Now, I think an external tool is not needed.

Other way (does not need an external software, just your brain ) :
 - create a local or domain user (called colorPrinterUser for example) and set it the desired password (the password will be the one used to print)
 - install the color printer  (give it a strange name like "CannotUseThisPrinter")  and check it works
 - share this printer (call the share ColorPrinterShare for example),
 - go to the security options (Security tab in the printer options) and give access to the user only (the user colorPrinterUser  you have just created)
 - create a local port  (see AddLocalPrinterPort here) - example : _Printmgr_AddLocalPort("c:\tmp\output.prn")
- install a second instance of the printer, give it the desired name like "Color Printer" (it will be the color printer used by users). Configure the printer to use the local port you have just created  (then the print will generate an output PRN file instead of printing it. The PRN file will by understandable by the printer seeing that the driver is the good one)
- create an AutoIt script which runs in background and waits for the PRN file to be present. If the file is present, the script asks for a password to the user : the password entered must match with the colorPrinterUser's password. Don't check for the password, but use RunAsWait to execute an external command  (use colorPrinterUser  as user and the password entered by the user). The external command will just send the PRN file to the shared CannotUseThisPrinter printer : copy /B c:\tmp\output.prn  \\127.0.0.1\ ColorPrinterShare . If the password is not correct, the RunAs execution cannot work, so you can display an error message and delete the PRN file.
So, seeing that the command is executed by colorPrinterUser and that this one is the only user allowed to print, it should work...

Good idea, or fetched again ? (I'm not sure my explanation is really clear, sorry) .

Edit : i read my message again : I'm affraid I'm the only one who understand what I try to explain

Edited July 21, 2016 by jguinch

[Valuater]

Thanks guys... and jguinch for the extra effort... and I do understand your concept... a little more difficult to implement than that single user password on each individual computer.

I will cook this over more...

Note: All computers are individual and are connected to a network printer.

Thanks for the ideas!!!