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PaperCut and Host-only drivers

A host-only driver is a driver that does not support printing via a print server. Instead it only supports direct printing from the workstation to the physical printer. In summary, printers using these drivers cannot be shared over a network using standard server Printer Sharing. Even though some of these printers may have network cards, they behave like locally attached printers (i.e. USB printers). Host-only printers are typically either low end or specialist printers such as wide-format printers. They don’t follow Microsoft’s or Apple’s driver guidelines to support server based queues. (Frustrating that this still happens in 2011! For example, many Canon and Epson printers, particularly on the Mac are host-only drivers.)

PaperCut can’t solve the driver deployment issue, however it is able to track host-only drivers with some additional configuration and setup.

Because host-only printers can’t be configured to use server based shared queues, the print monitoring and analysis needs to be done directly on the workstation before it’s sent to the printer. In affect, the printer is a “directly attached” printer and can be supported by setting up the Print Provider (aka secondary server setup) on the workstations. The procedure is outlined in here:

Here is a summary of the required configuration that needs to be done to monitor host-only printers:

1. Nominate the system(s) that will be configured to use the host-only printers. In an education environment, you’d usually select Lab systems located close to the printer.
2. Set these nominated system(s) as per the manufacturer’s guideline. Verify that printing works as expected. Make sure this is the case before moving to the next step.
3. Install the PaperCut Secondary Server Installation option on these system(s). Follow the secondary server install options as discussed in the manual here:
http://www.papercut.com/products/ng/manual/ch-secondary-print.html
4. In the print-provider.conf file enter the IP address of the primary server in the setting: 
         ApplicationServer=<primary server's IP address>
5. If you will have more than one system printing to the host-only printer, PaperCut will add a printer instance for each workstation. The multiple printer instance will make management hard (e.g cost changes will need to be applied to each instance). To have all instances list under the one, you can do the following:
i) Ensure the printer is consistently named on each workstation.
ii) Alias this system name so all workstations report usage under the one “virtual server” name. Add the following line to the print-provider.conf file: 
              ServerName=HostOnly
In addition, make sure the printer is added to the system(s) under the same name. (This will ensure multiple instances of the same printer do not appear in the admin interface)
6. On Windows, restart the PaperCut Print Provider service under Control Panel → Administrative Tools→Services and ensure that only one instance of the new host-only printer appears in the admin interface.
On Mac, run the Control Printer Monitoring.command program in /Applications/PaperCut NG/providers/print/mac and ensure that monitoring is only enabled on the host only printer.
7. Now printing will be monitored at the local system level and the usage details posted across to the primary server in real time. Perform some testing and verify that the system is working and can track printing as expected.

Ideally, vendors should be supplying quality drivers that are network aware and support servers. Please consider taking a few moments to email your vendor and add your voice to the choirs of complaints!

Categories: Printers, Troubleshooting

Keywords: locally-attached, lost driver options, apple, mac canon driver, mac epson driver, epson stylus 3880

Page last modified on October 18, 2011, at 07:29 PM

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