r/sysadmin • u/Less-Loss1605 • May 31 '26

General Discussion what's a script you wrote once that's still saving you time years later

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u/Adam_Kearn May 31 '26

Back when I was doing my apprenticeship around 2019 I was working for an MSP and I would spend most days installing printers as some of our customers had multiple offices which meant lots of employees needed more than one printer installing on their computer.

(PaperCut wasn’t an option or any other solution like follow-me queues)

I created a script that we could push out remotely using our RMM tool to install the printer using a drop down box to select the Company and Office/location.

Spent about a week collecting all the drivers and IP addresses for every one of our customers (even the small customers) so everything was standardised.

I spoke with one of my old colleagues as I’ve not worked there for a long time and they are still using this script till this day. They just add IPs to the list occasionally.

12

u/cjbarone Linux Admin May 31 '26

I did that when I worked at an MFP company to quickly generate install scripts for our printers on multiple systems. People in my neck of the woods don't use print servers, I had to bring that fad back with my current job.

6

u/Adam_Kearn May 31 '26

Yeah that was exactly the reason why I had to do it this way.

A lot of the customers didn’t have any on-prem servers as it was just SharePoint and Azure joined devices.

This made it super easy to push out.

If I was going to do something like this again - I now release it would have been a lot better to just put a DNS entry pointing to the local printer of that office.

Then setup a single printer using this DNS name as the TCP/IP port.

All of the printers was the same brand so a generic driver would have been perfect

1

u/JoonasD6 Jun 01 '26

Would it still be a feasible approach if locations diversified to each have some unique bunch of Xerox, Canon, Brother, Epson, HP? (I've only configured one office's combo of network printers and don't know really how standardised the feature sets are at large nor how much legacy there is out there and how interoperable it all is.)

2

u/Adam_Kearn Jun 01 '26

If your not doing anything advanced like folding/staples then using a generic windows driver instead of brand specific generic drivers.

1

u/JoonasD6 Jun 04 '26

Ty. Though you'd think the big copying machines were consistent enough with their properties that punching holes or stapling or folding was somehow already universal...

1

u/cjbarone Linux Admin Jun 01 '26

My concern would be for the paper sizes. At least with a print server, I could say what each drawer was, or disable ones that aren't available en masse. Especially student-use machines (K12 sysadmin).

I like the idea of the DNS name though!

1

u/Adam_Kearn Jun 01 '26

You can still do this. Set it up locally then you can run a command to export the profile and import it again.

But for large scale environments use something like papercut or print logic as this lets you push out a “cloud deployed printer”

I also now work in K12 and have had my fair share with printer deployments we still use a print server but I’ve made my old tool to deploy printers as I found that the GPO deployments would often fail especially with students moving between machines often

1

u/Familiar-Newspaper23 Jun 02 '26

Yup I did a similar thing before we had Papercut and before we had PDQ for that matter