Printer gibberish

[Carmelchik]

Hey there everybody,

I'm having trouble with the printer in my office. It's shared by graduate students in my lab via our local network. Yesterday someone sent some kind of document which used about 200 pages of paper with some kind of gibberish. I'm charged by my department for every single page and obviously this is a lot of waste. I'm trying to find out which one of my students sent this wasteful print job and obviously when I asked them none admitted responsibility.

Is there a way to view the printer's history and see which machine sent this printjob? Alternatively, is there a way to check each single computer and pull out a history of their print jobs? I greatly appreciate your help.

 

[Pysj]

By standard this option is not enabled.
This is how you can enable it.

To track printer usage
Open Printers and Faxes.
Right-click the printer you want to audit audit
The process that tracks the activities of users by recording selected types of events in the security log of a server or a workstation., and then click Properties.
Click the Security tab, click the Advanced button, and then click the Auditing tab.
Click Add, and then click the user or group whose printer access you want to audit.
In the Access column, click successful and failed printing events you want to audit, and then click OK twice.


So if you dont have this enabled im afraid you cant find out who printed those documents.


Kind regards Pysj`n

 

[UncleRick]

Some printers also keep a job log. The last 50 or so print jobs with the name of the job and the login name of the user. I have only seen this option on the larger commercial printers and not on the consumer models. Worth looking for though.