HP Advance Printer Management Tool

• GUI tool designed to allow for the mass configuration of devices in HP Advance / LRS VPSX from CSV file.

Table of Contents

• General Info
• Technologies Used
• Features
• Setup
• Usage
• Contact

General Information

• This project was developed for the requirements of presales consultants in the UK&I.
• The project was developed to allow for the mass ingress, modification and purge of devices from HP Advance.
• The project was born from the requirement of having a tool to do mass configuration. At the time LRS did not want to provide the PDDT tool to Presales consultants FOC.
• This project was an educational project to build a tool in Python for self education.
• LRS now provide the more polished and commercially available PDDT tool to Pre-sale Consultants under NFR.
• This tool provides a front end and csv file that can be feed into the nvpscfg.exe program for HP Advance (VPSX) Configuration.
• This project is for educational purposes only.

Technologies Used

• Python - version 3.8 - https://docs.python.org/3/
  • Modules - https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/modules.html
    • PySimpleGUI - https://pypi.org/project/PySimpleGUI/
    • clipboard - https://pypi.org/project/clipboard/
    • configparser - https://docs.python.org/3/library/configparser.html
    • csv - https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html#module-csv
    • os - https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.html#module-os
    • os.path - https://docs.python.org/3/library/os.path.html
    • datetime - https://docs.python.org/3/library/datetime.html
    • sys - https://docs.python.org/3/library/sys.html
    • subprocess - https://docs.python.org/3/library/subprocess.html
• Pyinstaller - version 4.2 - https://pyinstaller.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ (Only used to create EXE from *.py files)
• VPSX
  • nvpscfg.exe

Features

The tool provides the following capabilities:

• Import of Printers from csv format.
• Modification of Printers from csv format.
• Deletion of Printers from csv format.
• Printer Template should be created and configured in VPSX and referenced in CSV file as per example.
• Output of logging for all functions to txt file.

Screenshots

Setup

The project dependencies as are follows;

• Setup the project from source files;

  • Download and install Python 3.8 from https://www.python.org/downloads/

  • Ensure Python is added to environment SYS Path.

  • Install deps from the provided requirements.txt file as per below;

    pip3 install -r requirements.txt
    

Usage

• Running the project from source files;

  • Ensure all Dependencies are installed.

  • Populate the CSV file as per the example entry provided.

  • Run

    python main.py
    

  • Check Output dir for output and logs for errors.

Notes

• Please ensure you add the windows session user to the HP Advance (VPSX) Server configuration for nvpscfg.exe operations. Failure to do so will result in an "unauthorised operation" error message.
• Ensure you create a template printer in HP Advance configured with the settings you want all printers to follow.
• Ensure you reference the template printer in HP Advance in the printers.csv file as shown in the example.
• This tool is not an offical HP offering, it was developed as part of my personal education / development.