HP Web JetAdmin


Administrating a large number of printers, particularly remote printers, can be
a real pain in a Windows NT or Windows 2000 environment. My experience is
primarily with HP’s jetdirects. The jetdirect allows one to plug a printer into
the jetdirect and print to the printer, HP printer or whatever. The jetdirect
comes as a separate interface or is built into the HP network printers.

If you have a lot of remote printers, HP Web JetAdmin allows an administrator
to manage a hell of a lot of printers. A must if you you have HP printers. You
install JetAdmin on a webserver of your choice and administrate from any
browser. The JetAdmin main page is found here.

There is a dark side of this ease of administration. With putzes writing
viruses and running denial of service programs, you must implement some
security. HP network printers come with a built in web interface. You must set
the administrator password. This will prevent any tom, dick or harry from using
a port scanner to find these web interfaces on your printers and twiddling with
settings, taking the printer off/on line, setting the admin password to one you
don’t know, … Realize that these kind of web interfaces for remote admin are
already there in network printers and other network devices. Whether you want to
use JetAdmin, you still need to secure the network devices with web interfaces.

There have been two security issues reported for JetAdmin. There is a denial
of service which prevents the admin from getting into the JetAdmin site for Web
JetAdmin 6.0 on all supported platforms including Windows, HPUX, Linux, Solaris
and NetWare. Minor problem. Stop, then restart the JetAdmin service and you are
back in. Remember you can stop/stop services remotely. This denial of service only
effects JetAdmin access. Doesn’t do anything to ability to print.

JetAdmin 5.6 has bug which allows access to any file on the webserver running
JetAdmin. A good reason to upgrade to version 6. This kind of exploit is not
unique to this HP product. If you are in a security conscious organization, you
know that Compaq’s server remote admin had a similar bug, and that Microsoft’s
IIS seems to have one of these exploits reported frequently. I would recommend
using JetAdmin, but like all powerful tools, you need to be aware of the dark
side of such tools.

Printer Tips:

Improve print spooling
performance

RAW data mode
Print to a file
Steps to Manually Remove and
Reinstall a Printer Driver

Add Printer Panel icon to Windows NT Start Menu
Restrict the ability to add
print drivers to Administrators and Print Operators

Hide shared printer
How to Configure Printers on FPNW
to Service Pserver.nlm

Submit print jobs to wait afterhours to print
Print Server Migration Utility

NT Parallel Port
Thread Priority

Set
how long the port thread waits before giving up

Control printer popup messages

Printer Available
Broadcasts

How to
install a network printer only once for all users of the NT workstation

HP Web JetAdmin

Allow Print Operators
to add a printer

Drag
and Drop Printing

Add a
printer failed with message “Operation could not be completed. The RPC server is
unavailable.”

Don’t Get
Notified When Remote Documents Are Printed

About The Author

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Scroll to Top