Can you use DFS with printers

[notalot]

Properly a silly question but can you use the distributed file system with printers?

 

I haven't seen any where that you can’t but nor have I seen if you can.

[plexer]

No.

 

Ben

[srochford]

What do you want to do?

 

Are you trying to get the equivalent of replication so that you have multiple printers serving one queue (so if one fails, the other is still there) - if so, look for details of printer pooling.

 

If you just want to make it easy for users to find printers in the same way that DFS makes it easy to find shares then publishing the printers in AD may help.

 

Or perhaps you're trying to do something completely different :-)

[notalot]

nothing so grand, we script all our printer's so there isnt any problems there but we have to move them every now and again and its a pain to edit the scripts so i was looking to do it once with a dfs address so that it doesnt change.

[srochford]

Use a DNS alias

 

In DNS admin, set up a CNAME called (say) printserver which points to the "real" name of your print server (server1 or whatever)

 

Make the registry change described in this MS KB article It's talking about Windows 2000 but it's also needed for 2003

 

Change your scripts to point to \\printserver\printername etc

 

When you get a new server, change the DNS alias, make the registry setting and that's it.

 

Nice thing is that you can have both machines in place at the same time - clients which haven't refreshed their DNS values will just use the old one while machines starting up new will connect to the new server.

 

Separately, do you know about Microsoft print migrator for migrating queues to a new server? It makes it very easy to take a set of queues on one server and move them (complete with drivers, permissions etc) to a new server

[notalot]

yes i found the print migrater earler on and looks good, thanks for your help