Printing

[campbellp]

Hello,

 

At current we use two printserver, 1 for curriculum, 1 for admin

 

i would like to set up all the printers onto 1 central printserver which would need to be in a workgroup, I have built the server and installed a network printer to it, i then installed said printer onto an admin machine and curriculum machine. Great, worked fine.

 

The problem arises once I’ve logged off and back in as a student, teacher and indeed myself, i click print and it fails, but if i backslash to the printserver then print again it prints fine, understandable as a connection is being made with the correct credentials.

I have tried various work-rounds but am now at a loss....

 

Any help you may be able to provide will very much appreciated

 

Thank you in advance

 

P.Campbell

[dtakias]

How do you assign/deploy the printers to your machines?

 

Is the print server part of a domain? If yes does it run 2003 R2?

[campbellp]

The printers are installed locally on machine not via AD.

 

the printserver isnt part of a domain as once i join it to one i cannot print from the other and vise-versa as there is no trust between the two

 

 

Windows server 2003 R2

2xNIC 1-curric 1-admin

bradmin to administer the printers(as we only use brother)

[mullet_man]

You could join one domain, and make sure you have accounts of the same name and password setup on the other domain.

 

This would allow you to add printers from the other domain, basically you just have accounts on both domains.

 

That would work I think, would be a pain to keep track of password changes etc.

[Oops_my_bad]

If you want to use just the one print server to do this, you would either have to merge your admin/curriculum networks, or set up a domain trust between them both.

[mullet_man]

Or if you did not have any printer managment software on the network, you could enable the guest account, this would allow you to add the printers without credientals but each print would appear as GUEST and not the actual user.

 

Depends if you keep records on print usage or use software to track printing etc.

[steveg]

Is there a reason why you can't install the printers during logon, rather than having them already installed? This would force it to connect as the current user.

 

Steve

[campbellp]

Ok thanks looks like i may have to re-setup the trust between the two,

 

steveg, the only reason we do it like that is it was like that when we inherited the network from the previous network manager, we did try about a year ago to have AD deploy them but we where getting alot of strange behavure on the network. but we have rebulit both admin and curric servers since then so might give it another bash,

 

cheers

[User3204]

We have a mismash of a similar system.

Basically two print servers, one on each network, but we allow the staff to print on the student printers too (we trust them enough to not print confidential stuff to random classrooms - no really).

We have on our internal support site, a page with VBS scripts that run the connect and map, and this always asks for the staff to type in their student network usernames, but we tell the staff to tick the "remember me" button.

 

We didn't find any way to get it to automatically "know" which user is attaching to the server.

 

 

Do you have a trust relationship between your two domains ?

[Michael]

At current we use two printserver, 1 for curriculum, 1 for admin

 

I understand this OK, however...

 

i would like to set up all the printers onto 1 central printserver which would need to be in a workgroup

 

Setting up one print server makes sense, but why would it need to be in a workgroup? As already mentioned if you have two domains you have two options. Create a trust or merge the two domains. Merging the two domains initially can be a lot of work, but longterm it does pay off. It's just important to get those permissions correct and you'll be fine.

 

However, in saying all this there is a quick and easy fix if you're not too concerned about who has access to your printers. Wherever you have your printers installed (I mean whichever server), on the Security tab add "Anonymous Logon". This should allow anyone within any domain or workgroup to connect/print to a printer. All you need is the print server name and share name (which you know anyway).

[EduTech]

*Note: I have merged other thread with this one. please do not cross post.

 

James.