Printer Engineer Controls: Web Admin, Spooler and Print Queues
Open a printer's own web admin page through the Network Devices gateway, and restart the spooler, clear queues or print a test page on the customer's PCs.
Who the printer belongs to
The top of every printer page shows the customer it is billed to, with a link to the company. The Details card repeats it along with the Managed since date.
Open the printer's web admin page
If a device at the customer's site has Network Devices enabled (it acts as a gateway to the local network), the Engineer controls card shows Open printer web admin. It opens the printer's own admin page in a new tab through a secure Plenix proxy, so you don't need a VPN. If the printer only answers on HTTPS, use Try HTTPS.
If the button is unavailable, the card says why: for example, no gateway device for this customer is online, or the printer has no IP address.
Spooler and queue controls
Click Find queues. Plenix checks up to 8 online Windows PCs belonging to the same customer (the same network is checked first) and lists the PCs that have a print queue for this printer's IP address, with the spooler state and the number of jobs waiting.
For each PC you can:
- Restart spooler – fixes most stuck-queue problems.
- Stop spooler / Start spooler.
- Clear queue – removes the waiting jobs for this printer only.
- Flush spooler – stops the spooler, deletes every spooled file and starts it again. This affects every printer on that PC, so use it only when Clear queue doesn't help.
- Print test page – sends the Windows test page through that PC's queue.
- Make B&W the default / Make colour the default – changes the queue's default colour mode.
Actions that interrupt printing ask you to confirm first. Each one reports the result and the queue's state afterwards.
Requirements and permissions
- An online Plenix agent at the customer's site: a Network Devices gateway for web admin, and a Windows PC with the printer installed for spooler and queue actions.
- Only administrators and technicians can use these controls. If your account is limited to certain companies, you can only control those companies' printers.
- The commands are built by Plenix and run on the agent. Nobody can type a free-form script here.
Where to go next
← Previous
How Printer Pages Are Counted and Billed (Mono, Colour and Accent Colour)
Next →
Sending Managed Print Invoices Automatically
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