Printer management wizard

1

(imported topic written by Shlomi91)

Hi,

I’d like to see a “Printer management wizard” which will allow to install / update / remove printer drivers, ports or network printers.

this can easily be done from command line (using RUNDLL32 PRINTUI.DLL,PrintUIEntry /?), it is silent and network aware, just need a nice bigfix package…

Shlomi

2

(imported comment written by BenKus)

Very interesting idea… We will add it to the list (which is forunately/unfortunately quite long and full of things we want to make for you guys)…

Ben

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(imported comment written by Niraj Kumar Mishra)

Hi Ben,

Is there any way to push policy on printer like type of file which we want to restrict from print, restrict number of copies we can print at time, user level privilege for printing the documents.

Thanks

Niraj

4

(imported comment written by jgstew)

If you can do it through the registry or local gpo, then you can do it through bigfix/IEM.

Here are some examples of using LocalGPO through BigFix:

http://bigfix.me/fixlet/details/3747

http://bigfix.me/fixlet/details/3741

How would you achieve what you are looking for through the command line, or without bigfix?

5

(imported comment written by jgstew)

Toshiba has printer management working through BigFix for their Toshiba Smart Client Manager. I saw it demoed at Pulse.

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Now in 2021, I find this thread because of the issues surrounding the PrintNightmare remediation patch – non-admin users get prompted for new printer driver updates. Being non-admin users, however, they cannot install said updates. I’ve been looking about for ways to automate this via BigFix, but so far it’s as clear as mud.

While the Windows GUI allows one to “update driver” for a device, the underlying cli tools (PowerShell PrintManagement, printui.dll,PrintUIEntry) only do things like add and delete.

That’s fine and all, but if the drivers are on the print server how do you know which one to add? Versioning among different manufacturers and models is… challenging. Some put version numbers in the name. Some use traditional versions. And then there’s this, which does a bitwise conversion of the DriverVersion field and gets something that looks like a software version.

Between all this, I’m struggling to find a working model to tackle this.

1] get printers and printer drivers on local computer
2] identify matching printers and drivers on print server
3] identify possible matches for newer print drivers on print server
4] {some kind of magic that discovers the newest matching driver for a given printer}
5] {how to discover the share path that has the newest driver’s .inf?}
6] add the newest printer driver to the local printer
7] delete older ones from the local printer?

…or…

Since print server printers are assigned via group policy, just have BigFix run gpupdate /force now and then?

Any thoughts from the hive mind?

7

Not a solve for your larger use case, but perhaps an interesting bit of relevance to help with the bitwize conversion edge case.

q: (bit set (first 16 of it) as integer, bit set (first 16 of following text of first 16 of it) as integer, bit set (first 16 of preceding text of last 16 of it) as integer, bit set (last 16 of it) as integer) of padded string of ("2814750890000385" as integer as bits)
A: 10, 0, 10, 1