Difference between Printer and Print Queue

[ssuhail]

Greetings!

While running our discovery scans, we were able to discovery about 60% of the Printers in the environment (CMDB_CI_PRINTER). We also noticed that under "CMDB_CI_PRINT_QUEUE" all the "Printers" maintained by the Infrastructure team are listed.

Can any help me understand what is this print queue and how is it different from Printer / not classified as a Printer?

regards,

Suhail

[anurag92]

Printer CIs are pointers to actual Physical Printers in company's organization.

Print Queues are a list of printer output jobs on a particular machine/computer. For instance, printer ci can be 'Canon i960' and Print Queue can be:Canon i960 MP 1238 (Finance Bay).

If at your end, both print queue and printer are showing same data, check the source once.

[Alexander Ljung]

Hi Suhail,

cmdb_ci_printer has only information about devices that produces a paper copy (physical).

cmdb_ci_printer_queue has data about reserved areas of memory or the disk that hold information/output specifically for a printer until the printer can receive it and produce the output. A record here contains for example how many errors the queue has encountered.

Does it make sense in your installation or is it wrongly classifying printers as devices in the printer queue? I'd recommend inspecting the payloads from the discovery result to narrow it down, and perhaps to a single discovery against an IP where a print queue is classified to really dig down into it. It's important to see what values your discovery is returning.

I hope this answers helps and brings some clarification to your mystery! If so please mark as helpful.

Best Regards,

Alexander

[Dave Smith1]

• A printer is a physical hardware device.
• A print queue is a virtual concept, a holding area to contain spooled jobs whilst the printer is trying to catch up. You don't send a job to a printer, you actually send it to a queue and let it eventually emerge.

Further information that could be useful:

• A printer requires a queue for it to be used. So every printer should have at least one queue.
• A printer may have several queues - each queue will process the data differently.   This is a common technique for managing multi-tray printers; one queue will be used for letter-headed notepaper, another for plain paper, another for punched, etc.   Each queue will instruct the printer to select a specific tray before proceeding with the job.
• A queue doesn't require a printer - it can continue to accept jobs whilst the printer is off-line, for example: being repaired.  
• Some queues don't terminate in a printer - like a "PDF printer", or fax server.   Attempting to send a document to that queue will process the document in some way.
• JetDirect printers are usually configured as local printers (so page processing takes place locally) then the transformed data is squirted to an IP address.
• HP5 printers break too easily.

[sub0]

This is absolutely not correct. A "Printer" is not a piece of hardware. That is called a "Print Device".   The "Printer" is something you install on the Print Server.

You are not wrong for layman's/common parlance, but when it comes to troubleshooting and technical information regarding a Microsoft Server environment, the terms mean different things.   (Reference: MS Server Administration manuals).

Regarding OP's question, they are looking for the difference between this virtual printer component and how it is different from a Print Queue in technical terms - rather than asking for the difference between a Print Device and a virtual queue.