CC4 and Printers

[synaesthesia]

Hiya,

 

Hopefully a quicky. How does CC4 map printers? It's utter rubbish no matter how many fixes they've given it. I can't find them referenced anywhere in Group Policy (unless I'm missing it, entirely likely). I'd like to entirely remove printers from the RM side of it and deploy them properly and reliably using GPP. Fed up of having printers that are clearly mapped and correctly allocated either not show up, showing up old printers that no longer exist even after gpupdates etc and just general CC4 nastiness!

 

(I know it maps via the management console obviously, just mean the underlying tech!)

Edited September 24, 2014 by synaesthesia

[supawat1]

I'm not sure whether this might be the answer for you.

 

You do not have to add any printers to the RM CC4 server, you can just use another server and add Print and Document services role to it.

 

If you go into each Printer Properties => Sharing => tick on List in the directory. Then, RM CC4 Management console will pick up the Printer and then use the console to assign the printer to each area.

 

If you want to remove any old printers, you can go to the Printer Properties => Sharing and untick "List in the directory", then you wont see any old printers in your Management console again.

[synaesthesia]

Yes, I'm fully aware of that - perhaps I should clarify.

This is a single server primary. CC4 is awful at handling printers. Ultimately, I wish to deploy them via GPP and remove CC4's involvement in them whatsoever. This will be on the same server. I just want to check that CC4 don't already deploy via either GPO or GPP and I just can't find them; if they are there, I would rather edit them as appropriate.

Annoyingly, CC4 blocks RSOP so I can't pinpoint any policy handling using gpresult or gp results wizard.

[foofighterjim]

I think you should be ok, I don't think CC4 uses GPO to allocate printers; it just populates the list of available printers from AD. I believe printer delivery is handled by the RM Printer Manager Package, although I could be wrong!

[jaf]

As far as I understand things RM uses several of its own components and exe files - namely RM Station delivery (stndeliv2.exe) on logon to map/unmap printers and drives. You could try ignoring the management console for printers and deploying them via GPP but I don't think you'll be able to completely remove the RM printer side of things from your clients without breaking the whole way RM works, and you'll lose shared drives etc etc. You can check the stndeliv logs in C:\Program Files\Research Machines\Network Management\LogFiles

 

As a side note we've recently had lots of problems with printers randomly assigning themselves to user accounts and not unmapping - this was due to 64-bit drivers not being the same version and name as the 32-bit drivers so worth checking! RM's solution was to remove every printer and re-add them but I just matched up the version and printer driver names and it seems to have fixed it.

 

Hope that helps a little bit.

[synaesthesia]

Cheers, that makes sense. Seems daft that they would add such a heavy workload to their already bugeoning CC4 database for things that are handled well within Windows itself. I know the printer wrapper has to exist to take care of it's print management but every other print management package on the planet can handle it!

I shall bite the bullet, remove all printers from management console and add them properly!

Thanks for the input.

[jaf]

Might also be worth checking with RM to see if deployment via GPP is possible.. They won't recommend it I'm sure but I just wondered if they might know a reason/reasons why it wouldn't work before you go to the effort!

[synaesthesia]

I'm sure they know a reason - CC4 just isn't up to it. I'm fairly sure it's a lot better on a multiple server site, but when on a single server which is DC, File server, MIS server, CC4 etc things start to crawl. It's hardly an efficient bit of kit!

No reason GPP/GPO shouldn't work - I already use GPO there to push out things like fonts.

[foofighterjim]

Out of interest what is the spec of the server if you are expecting it to do all of those roles well?

[ptotham]

just wasted 2 days on this having setup a printer mapping script that would work manually but wasn't working at logon, turns out the RM station delivery manager is removing my printer mappings cause I am not applying any printers in the RM console to my test group.

[deano3693]

I'm sure they know a reason - CC4 just isn't up to it. I'm fairly sure it's a lot better on a multiple server site, but when on a single server which is DC, File server, MIS server, CC4 etc things start to crawl. It's hardly an efficient bit of kit!

No reason GPP/GPO shouldn't work - I already use GPO there to push out things like fonts.

 

Why would you not split out some of the roles. Virtualise the one server and seperate out into CC4, MIS, Print, AV etc etc.

[AlanD]

I hate jumping in on this....because there is a lot I would be happy to moan about to RM - especially the above inflation increase in support costs. That alone would make me get them on the phone and say "you fix it". In fact...why haven't you done this? Its what you are paying for. Make them work for their money. We have perhaps a 100 printers - tens of different types - all connected through RM CC4...and all I can say is that it does all work...or at least it works for us. Yes its sometimes a hassle "extracting" the driver in the right format to be able to add the 32 bit driver into the otherwise 64 bit server. (nothing to do with RM of course - just that some printer manufacturers like to distribute a single zipped exe file which automatically extracts either the 32 or 64 bit driver on the fly when run ) Yes _ we sometimes mess up - and forget to tick the "windows" box to share the printer - and/or to list it in the directory (nothing to do with RM....)....Or don't stick to a sensible naming convention. Once listed you can allocated it from RM console to a sensible"location" or parent location - and subsequent logons at PCs in those locations will see the printer. Sometimes we forget to allocate a reserved DHCP address and at some random later time are surprised the printer doesn't work.

 

We quite like the RM printer credits...not necessarily to limit printing (we usually allocate a very large to all staff) - but as a way to monitor it. (We prefer to allocate small weekly amounts to students) . Weird things do happen to printer credits - they often seem become a large negative number...and less often...we do see printing stop - and its necessary to restart the printer services on the server.

[synaesthesia]

Why would you not split out some of the roles. Virtualise the one server and seperate out into CC4, MIS, Print, AV etc etc.

 

Because that's overkill for most large deployments let alone a primary school. That's beyond overkill, that's someone looking at Microsoft's "best practice" and taking it as gospel.

[AlanD]

...and Iwould never advise messing about with GPOs without RM's say so....chances are that you could really mess stuff up - not least of all because you will end up with conflicts. When using RM CC4 - you MUST use do it the RM way - or be prepared for a lot of grief - which it sounds as if you are getting - and to be honest when I hear what you are doing - I'm not surprised. I note and earlier post saying that you do not need to install the printer on the server. This is true....but if the PC with that printer can't be found (because PC is turned off) when other PCs boot the result will be frustrating and confusing for users. (I think you are also limited to 10 connections per printer this way too). No; you SHOULD install the printer software on the server (but extract the proper drivers first - don't just run the install or you'll end up with a lot of stuff that would not be appropriate on a server - especially when the printer is probably not connected directly to the server. I agree with earlier posts that the RM veneer does put some load on the server - but its not going to affect usability as most servers are more than well enough spec'd - often with multi CPU, multi core Xeon CPUs and more than enough memory. (I would check the memory use though...as I have seen memory leaks - and RM could not fix it for me - so we ended up adding 32GB into the server). To be honest - I would say the RM system is just the kind of solution that primary school need, and the last thing that primary needs is someone with muddy boots trampling all over the setup because they don't understand how to make it work. Phone RM. Do it now. Its what you pay for. Why are you wasting time on it? (And please stop making me defend RM...)

[synaesthesia]

just wasted 2 days on this having setup a printer mapping script that would work manually but wasn't working at logon, turns out the RM station delivery manager is removing my printer mappings cause I am not applying any printers in the RM console to my test group.

 

Funny really. I've come across another such setup which is causing all sorts of testicular aches. Googled, and the first thing to come up is my thread on Edugeek

 

And the issue is exactly this above. Took all the printers off CC4 and did it properly via GPP yet they disappear at logon. Then randomly reappear midway through the day. Time to go digging!

 

And before anyone starts - eyes on you, @AlanD - we don't (that's won't) pay RM support for obvious reasons so they won't be doing anything with it. We're trying to make do until we can replace it with something that works.

The particular issue I'm currently having is that the school has a new batch of printers in which need to pop up authentication boxes etc. No matter what we do, that just won't work with CC4 dishing out the printers. If I do it the proper method with GPP, it just works exactly as it should, in the way that it does in all my other schools with hundreds of printers and precisely zero issues. But with CC4 actively removing those mappings, it's more than an annoyance. Just about to try a delay script, to wait 30 seconds after logon or something before hitting gpupdate... then no doubt CC4 will still see fit to remove them with background processing

Edited May 18, 2017 by synaesthesia

[AlanD]

...Ah well, I'd understand now that you say you don't want ( = won't) pay for support. To be fair - I have never had a criticism with actual support from RM.... its just that that support cost is on top of the high cost buying into CC4 ...and more than half of the support required is to fix and prop up CC4 itself with precious little in the way of added feature - and very few bug fixes.....and to continue to see these support costs run well above twice the rate of inflation to pay RM engineers that probably haven't had a single pay rise is frankly - galling. I think I would have tested the printers prior to purchasing them knowing they had to work with CC4....Using RM has always been somewhat of a straight jacket. We all know this. You can't have both the complete freedom and infinitely customisable features of a vanilla system and a locked down , prescriptive and easy to manage system. One choice is always - to some extent - going to forfeit some of the benefits of the other. If you want the freedom to do what you like...rebuild the servers as vanilla ones and restore the user data from backups. If you want the safe easy to manage RM system...then you be prepared to be held hostage by RM to extract ever increasing support costs. I don't think there is any in-between solution.

[deano3693]

Have you actually looked at the CC4 Log files for print mapping to confirm this is the cause of the printers disappearing as my understanding was you don't have to use the CC4 Print delivery method and can deliver via GPP if you so wish. I don't see why the pop up boxes don't appear we have printers that require authentication pop up boxes and have no issues (Once we had turned on balloon notification on Windows 7) This is disabled on RM by default and i suspect might be the cause of your issue?

[synaesthesia]

They're not popup balloons in that respect, they're rather more in your face (Konica), taking up most of the screen. Plus, if anything from RM was blocking them, they wouldn't work with the alternative way they were mapped.

And indeed this will likely be an ongoing issue until we can finally go fully vanilla

 

And indeed, station delivery unmap printer.csv shows it doing just that

Edited May 19, 2017 by synaesthesia