Date: 06/24/06 (IT Professionals)    Keywords: software, web

This may be a somewhat trivial question, but I'm pretty new to all of this IT stuff, and self taught so I'm trying to piece things togeather. At the place where I work, we have around 10 printers you can get to over the network, or by IP if you have a mac. I check all of those for paper, etc, once a day but sometimes the paper will run out between checks and create a bottleneck on another printer, not to mention those with the mentality of "oh, i didn't work the first time, let me hit the print button 20 more times to see what happens" so when we do get the printer up again a couple hundred pages come shooting out that we throw away (huge waste). So, the vision I have, is a webpage that updates itself to reflect the status of our printers, that I can check to see when a printer has an error like no ink, and everyone else can use if they want to find a printer without a long que of jobs. Is there any way to do that, preferably without extra software we have to pay for? A friend suggested using lcp status in terminal to get the number of jobs in the que, however we were off location and unable to test if the number in the que reflects every job waiting in the printer, or just ones that computer has sent to be printed, and after googling it I wasn't clear on the answer. Also, more than that, I'd really like the page to show when the printer is, say, out of paper. I found a log in the cups part of console for errors, and I was thinking that if I could simply make an apple script that checked the console, pulled text from it to the website, anytime someone tried to print and there was an error the site would reflect it and I could take care of it (basically, no need for the status to constantly update, just reflect when someone tried to print and there is an issue). However, if my logic is right (and again, I haven't tested this out) then, because it's an error message, the error would only show up in the log of the computer that was trying to print, not any computer on the network... unless someone can think of some way around that so that it does show up? My idea was to use one of our old G3's and, should we work some way out to get the consule file to show any error on the printer, run the apple script on that and somehow have that dynamically update the website. I'm not sure if the concept I'm going for makes sense at all, but has anyone tried anything similar before, or have any steps in the general direction I might could try?

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/itprofessionals/40092.html