On Wed, 2007-08-29 at 14:40 -0700, Danek Duvall wrote:
> If you can uniquely identify by serial number in some large percentage of
> the printers out there, that's probably good enough -- I bet people are
> more likely to recognize a printer by IP address than MAC address, if they
> need to get down to it.
Given the diversity of network-attached printers out there, whatever we
do, we're going to be stuck with messy heuristics. I'd rather not throw
long strings of numbers into the mix until more human-friendly
identifiers are exhausted.
At the smallest scale (home office/small office), people are most likely
to recognize printers by make & model because if there is more than one
printer, they will be of different types.
At the other end of the scale, the two printers nearest me within Sun's
burlington office both have SNMP sysName values set sensibly (matching
the name on the label pasted to the outside of the printer). Both have
reasonable looking sysLocation values containing sun building codes and
room numbers. Unfortunately one of them is wrong (right building, wrong
floor...)
But I think we could do better than to force users to pick printers by
mac address or ip address.
- Bill
