Windows 2000 Server Question: Setting up printers

[kylef]

I'm volunteering my time at a local high school that is setting up a new Windows 2000 active directory network, and I have a couple questions about Windows 2000 server and printing.

Suppose that I list several network-enabled printers (such as the HP 4100N) in Active Directory in my Windows 2000 server box.

1. On a Windows XP Pro workstation, when I want to add this printer, I click on "Network Printer" and then navigate to the Domain and find the printer. Windows automatically installs the printer, even installing the right drivers for me. How does it know to install the right driver, and once it knows, where does it get the XP driver from? I've never installed the XP driver on ANY machine! The only driver I manually installed on the server was the Windows 2000 print driver on the Win2k Server box. Additionally on the server, when I check to see what "additional drivers" are installed and made available to the domain, there is not even an option for Windows XP (only Windows 2000 and earlier Windows editions are listed). Is there any way to specifically add drivers for Windows XP? My guess here is that XP is able to use the Win2k drivers and that's why it's worked so far...

2. A network printer, by definition, has its own built-in print spooler. When the printers are setup via the above method (over the Domain), print jobs seem to go through the Windows 2000 Server's print spooler. Why is that? Why would the jobs not just go straight to the printer? Is there any way to make the jobs go straight to the printer, without having them go through the server's spooler, but keep the above nice driver installation functionality? We don't want the print jobs to go through the server because our server is constantly coming down right now for maintenance and such, and whenever it does, no one can print!

Thanks for any tips!

Kyle

 

[Saltin]

Kylef

1) As you discovered, a print server in Win2k has a set of requisite drivers for every print device it hosts. My guess is that your XP machine is using the 2k driver, and that wouldnt be abnormal. You could try finding an XP driver for that printer and installing it on the print server, that way the XP clients would recieve a more suitable driver. If printing is working though, I wouldnt sweat it. As for how the print server knows which driver....well, it can identify the client's OS type, and it knows which printer you want to install, it just spits out the driver based on these two variables.

2) If the print server comes down, so does the ability to print to any print devices it hosts. That's pretty cut and dry. As a tip to you, make it a personal goal to ensure the server doesnt come down. It's tough to make this a reality, but you should always strive to find ways to maximize your uptime. Your current postion isn't your bread and butter job, obviously (highschool and all), but it's a good chance to learn about the holy grail named "uptime". Even if it's for your own personal satisfaction now, it pays to know how to keep servers available in the working world.

Also, to clarify things for you,
Print Device= hardware (machine) that prints
Printer = The window you see on the print server that displays jobs
Spooling= the printers ability to hold off on printing a job to the print device untill the entire job is recieved by the printer. You can control spooling on the properties of the printer.

Good luck

 

[kylef]

Hmmm... I was afraid of that. I think what we're going to do is keep a small number of publicly accessible printers shared by the domain controller, and setup the other "office" network printers manually on the machines that need to use them. That way if the server were to go down for some reason, it wouldn't halt all printing at the school 🙂

Unfortunately, I can only donate so much of my time to this place. It appears as though the Win2k Server is extremely messed up (and it's only about 3 months old), which isn't surprising given the fact that the admins here are all Apple people. They were throwing every piece of software they acquired onto the server (whether it needs to be there or not). I tried to explain to them that the more things they have running on their (single) server, the greater the likelihood that it will crash or fail and kill their entire network. I've never encountered a place before that allowed their Primary Domain Controller to run so much other crap...

The sad thing is, I asked them to purchase a second Windows machine to offload some of the other stuff, and they don't have the resources because they just bought an entire set of Apple OSX servers... Which they aren't using for ANYTHING, since all of the students here are running Windows XP on their issued laptops... It's insane!

 

[wlee]

You should be able to drive some of the printers via a Mac OS-X Server. It has support built in for Windows Clients.

 

[lobadobadingdong]

Beware, if they have any NT 4.0 boxes Win2k servers printer drivers are almost NEVER compatable, if you run into any of these however, you can use the NT 4.0 drivers for the printers on Win2k and then install the Printer Sharing configs for the Server. This is how the Social Security Administration fixed thier problems on their Lexmark Laser printers, almost everything they have uses NT 4.0 workstation, the only acceptions are Reston, VA (main control office), new laptops(less than 1 year old), and thier new Dell PE 6400 servers which use Win2k or Win2k Enterprise Edition.