Connect to print share from non domain PC

[wseyller]

Server 2008 R2 domain controller with two printer shares

Many computers not joined to the domain need to connect to these printer shares. These computers cannot be joined to the domain as they are personal computers/laptops

The print jobs MUST render on the server because a print management software monitors these print queues so they cannot print directly the the IP of the copier.

These users already use a common domain account to connect to a file share on the server.

When I set all this up in the beginning I was able to connect with my laptop not joined to the domain by just doing a run command then \\server which would prompt for credentials. I enter in a domain account and tell it to remember my choice so it survives a reboot. Then I just double click on the printer share to install. This worked fine for a couple computers I tested this with.

My customer is now trying to do this for all the other users and cannot get it to work and their 3rd party IT have tried and talked to me about it.

The get an error: windows cannot connect to the printer access is denied

The everyone group has print permissions.
I noticed that the guest user and domain guest is enabled and has print permission. There are many more users and groups also with print permissions.

Any idea how to make this work or figure out what is happening.

Thanks

 

[brshoemak]

The ones that initially worked, do they still work? Were those few perhaps using a pro version of Windows or were they using the consumer version?

Do you know if the users had their primary local user account set to be the local Administrator or just a standard user? Change their main user account to be an Administrator if it isn't already.

When you attempt to access the printer, what do the event logs on the server show? You should be able to see the security event where the server denies the connection.

Not sure why a 3rd party IT company wouldn't be able to solve or troubleshoot a Windows printing issue.

 

[drebo]

This type of setup is untennable. There are simply too many different kinds of devices with varying degrees of issues and problems.

You're probably talking about a real estate agency or something similar.

If so, you might consider looking at something like PaperCut to facilitate printing from non-domain devices.

To be honest, I'd never let a non-company controlled device authenticate against my domain (guest wifi should be firewalled off) because newer versions of Cryptolocker and similar malware don't need shared drives and will actively seek out file shares on any server that can be authenticated against.

 

[wseyller]

Not sure about the intial ones. Because it was my laptop and another laptop that were used as a test only. Some of the staff computers which are joined to the domain of course do work.

BRSHOEMAK:
The their IT did try his own 8.1 pro logged in as a local admin account and it didn't work for him.

I will look into testing it further and inspect event logs.

DREBO:
Yes it is a real estate office.
We are a PaperCut reseller and use it alot with Konica Minolta Bizhubs and I love papercut but this is Uniflow which was sold to the customer with their canon copier. At the time papercut didn't have an embedded solution for the canon. It was sold and my computer wanted me to make it work so they would not have to refund for the software.