Printers

[mmholland]

Hey guys,

 

We have about 400 PC's in our environment. Previously, the IT guys that I am currently joined with have had issues with group policy deploying printers. Actually, group policy in general, and that is for 1 reason...SID's. Back before I started they was not aware of sys prep before cloning using ghost. We have a mixture of windows xp machines, and now since I started over a year ago, all new PC's, or PC's we repair get a windows 7 image on them. When I started they were using Clonezilla and ghost to image PC's. Since I have started, I have setup a FOG server to deploy OS images. I have virtualbox setup that I take a snapshot of before I sysprep it and upload it to FOG so that I can make changes/updates to the image.

 

Anywho, moving forward I have been imaging PC's correctly using sysprep before I upload the image. Using an unattend.xml as an answer file to make things smoothly, and making FOG install a few things after the cloning is done, and join the domain. Makes my life very easy and less time consuming. Moving further I have been working on deploying printers through Group Policy. Since I am using sysprep, the SID's are all correct and none are the same. As I roll out new PC's to different locations, I am now using group policy to deploy them.

 

I am not worrying about deploying to windows XP machines with the same SIDS...as they will all be replaced in the next year...From here on out I want to use group policy to deploy.

 

This leads to my actual question. There are several locations that I have already replaced PC's since I started...All printers have been setup as local ports pointing to our print server...adding a local port like this \\printserver\shared printer name.....These machines are windows 7 PCs with correct SIDS....I know that when I make a group policy object for the location in question and add it to deploy by PC, I am going to end up with duplicate printers since the printers are already setup for local ports so that it would show up for all users.

 

What would be the best way to remove all of the local ports from say a remote location at a time so that there are no duplicate printers?

Edited September 6, 2012 by mmholland