Renaming user accounts

I have renamed my users in the directory (e.g. in Active Directory Domain, Google Workspace etc), or I’m moving from sAMAccountNames to UPNs. How do I also rename my accounts in PaperCut?

PaperCut uses the username as the primary user identifier. In effect it’s the primary key in the database. When a user is renamed in a directory (like AD), PaperCut treats the renamed Active Directory user account as a brand new account (the equivalent to deleting the old account and adding a new account). Due to limitations in the Windows API, and the need to be cross platform, it’s not possible for us to use things like SAM account UIDs to identify accounts, so automatic renaming of Users in PaperCut is not supported.

It’s not uncommon for sysadmins to ask how to rename users in PaperCut. Here are some situations we’ve heard of:

• Your user had some major life changes that have led to them adopting a new name. Congratulations!
• Your organization is moving from usernames to UPNs. either because you’re using UPNs to prevent username clashes , or maybe you’re sync’ing your users with Azure AD and you’re wanting to do some cleanup to rename users with the ‘old’ username format (MailNickName) to the ‘new’ format of UPN.

Either way, PaperCut does provide some scripting tools that can be used to manage account renaming. The server-command program can be used either directly, or in a script to manually facilitate account renaming.

Consider Username Aliasing

Instead of renaming users in PaperCut, one alternative solution is to set up an “alias” for the username, which allows a single PaperCut user to have multiple valid usernames. With this method, the user will be able to continue to print or log into the UI with the old or the new username. For more details, see Enable username aliasing . One more thing that’s convenient about this solution is that username aliases individually, or en masse through several different means.

Renaming users in PaperCut MF/NG

The below procedure outlines a re-name procedure based on the username changing in AD, but the same procedure can be applied to converting your PaperCut usernames from MailNickName / sAMAccountName (e.g. alex.test), to UPN (e.g. alex.test@organization.com ).

1. Re-name the account in Active Directory (or other User Directory if you’re using one).
2. Use ‘Run as Administrator’ to run the command prompt (cmd.exe) on the Application Server and type:
   • cd c:\Program Files\PaperCut NG\server\bin\win
   • server-command rename-user <old_username> <new_username>
   • Note: Take care to make sure the old and new names are typed correctly. If either of the usernames contains a space, you will be required to include quotation marks to differentiate the two names. For example: server-command rename-user “john smith” “jsmith”
3. The user account should now appear in PaperCut with the new name and all historic print history, credit, print quotas and transaction audit logs should be carried over to the new name.

The same procedure may be used on Linux, Novell or macOS server systems. The path to server-command will however vary depending on the platform.

Advanced network/system administrators may wish to use server-command directly in a rename-user script or batch file. For example, this single script would rename the user in AD, PaperCut, email system, home drive names, and any other database/system around the organization all in one go.

Do you have ‘duplicate’ users in PaperCut MF/NG?

If you’re here because some of your users have changed their preferred names, got married, or gone through other name-changing events, then you may have landed up with the same user in your user list twice, for example alex.thisname and alex.thatname.

Why does this happen?

As mentioned above, PaperCut will see the username as the identifier - so will look at the updated alex.thatname user in your Active Directory or equivalent (which was renamed from alex.thisname), and say ‘oh that’s a new user since that user doesn’t exist in PaperCut’. The user with the updated username will then be created as a new user in PaperCut.

How do I fix this?

Unfortunately in PaperCut NGMF there is no way to truly merge users, so you’ll need to delete the new user, then rename the old user to the new username. For more information follow the process outlined in the Merging Users KB article.