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I'm about to take the plunge into thin clients. I'd really prefer to go with Sun technology, but don't think the budget will allow. Our LA have proposed a purely MS TS solution, just using the tools built into Windows Server 2008. This is, of course, the cheapest option. Any general thoughts on going with just MS, and not using Citrix or Sun? Anything that would justify the higher cost for a cash-strapped small school? My main worry is assigning printers based on the clients ID (i.e. grouping them by room and assigning printers that way). I know the Sun Solaris solution can do this, but can Windows TS also do this? Or is there a feasible workaround? Thanks.

I have a very simple script to remove all network printers, however this does not remove old printers that are no longer attached to the network. How should I modify the attached script to remove 'all' printers? Go easy on me, scripts are not my forte remove-network-printers.vbs.txt

Not sure if this is the right place, but... The Business Manager's machine at one of my sites has started hanging at "Welcome" if any domain user tries to log on. It's fine for local users, and also fine in Safe Mode with networking (though then Office won't open). I think I have narrowed it down to the printers/GPO as it logs on fine when I deny read access to this. However I am then unable to add the printers either by a script or via Devices and Printers (which just hangs). The machine still hangs at "logging off" when shutting down though, and certain documents (Publisher ones that seem to have printer details embedded) won't open. I'm not aware of any changes that would have caused this - she claims it's shut down daily - and the last changes to the printing setup was a few weeks back. Any ideas before I'm back there again? I'd like to re-image, but she's not keen on letting me at it until next Friday.

Hi all, I have just had a overhall of printing, by installing a dedicated printserver aswell as adding 15 new network printers. The majority of the printers are HP 2015n's with a handful of Ricoh document stations. 35 printers in total. Originally there were vbs scripts mapping the printers, however these were not working as well as I would have liked, so I decided to deploy the printers through group policy on a 2k3 R2 server. All client machines are XP. I have deployed the printers, and have placed the pushprinterconnection.exe into the startup section of the group policy editor. On the OU that I have been testing this on, the printers ARE deployed, however after a minute or 2 they start disapearing from the client machine. There are no other scripts, as I have removed them all, and I have tried deploying to both user startup and computer startup. Any ideas? This one is really baffling me!!! Help would be greatly appreciated. Kind Regards.

Morning all Trying to set up a few printers to deploy through group policy and ran into a problem. The printers will not deploy for love nor money, I've sorted point & print etc Ran through gpresult and noticed it's deploying from the secondary DC, which is fine however, when checking the policy settings on the 2ndary, the 'deployed printers' tab just literally isn't there. I'm wondering if it could be a sysvol replication issue, though there is nothing in the event logs and everything else seems to be fine. Main DC is server 19, secondary server 2012r2 Really has me stumped, just wondered if anyone has ran into similar issues or has any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Hi New to Mosyle (not to Macs have used JAMF Pro and JAMF School before) We have a room of 32 Macs in Music room that are attached to AD, we want to push a networked printer to them for students to use. For some reason the printer set up in Mosyle doesn't appear in the Printers and Scanners pane in System Settings. Cant find much in the way of guides/ support in Mosyle, anyone had experience of doing this and making it work? Thanks in advance Steve

Now that VBScript is going end-of-life, we are once again having to look at how we make print queues available to users. Currently we have a logon script for students (and student-like accounts, such as exam accounts) that runs a VBScript that connects to the appropriate print queues, based on the AD computer object’s Location attribute. It also has logic around retrying if the connection isn’t successful the first time. We’ve tried GPO deployment in the past and found it to be too unreliable. It’s not good enough for it to work every other login, it needs to work every time consistently or we can’t use it. GPO deployment has no mechanism to enable retrying the printer connection if it doesn’t work the first time. We block PowerShell for students, so we can’t just turn the script into a PowerShell script, unless there’s a way to block PowerShell except for logon scripts PaperCut Print Deploy is out, as we’d have to pay an additional fee to have more than one Zone, and maintaining the Zones would be a nightmare as it doesn’t have any functionality around looking at the computer object’s Location attribute Given the above limitations, can anyone suggest a method we can use for print queue deployment to students in place of our existing VBScript?

Since we started back last week in school I'm having an issue with printers not deploying properly. I use Group Policy to deploy and not changed a thing over summer, now when loggin on to a machine I get Event ID 4098. The user 'HP-YstA' preference item in the 'Printers & Drives {4E6FD393-5080-4BBB-B4B7-8617E81D7134}' Group Policy Object did not apply because it failed with error code '0x800703eb Cannot complete this function.' This error was suppressed.

We have recently decided to start the upgrade process and roll out Windows 7 Enterprise. Win 7 is currently installed on my machine and a few others for testing. Our printers are deployed using a batch file as different people need different printers. The batch file works correctly on XP and should on Win 7. When I run the script it asks if I want to install the driver, for which I press yes. However the printer then does not appear? Which confuses me, our print server is running server 2003 R2 incase this makes a difference

Hi, I've a rather frustrating problem as I'm no coding expert, i've the below vbs script that assigns printers and sets default based on OU, it's come from this valuble community in the first place and with some slight tweaking works a treat for us, the issue is that the centre manager now doesn't want student access to the colour laser, nice and easy, set deny on the printer ACL for students. Job done, however as this confuses them the colour printer is not to be on for students, just staff. Is there a way to incorporate this change into the script? maybe a 'are they a member of staff group?' type affair? I'd apreciate any help or pointers the assist in arriving at a solution! dim oAdSysInfo, sCompPath set WShShell = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell") set WShNetwork = WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Network") set oAdSysInfo = CreateObject("AdSystemInfo") Set oPrinters = WshNetwork.EnumPrinterConnections ' Delete existing connections to network printers For i = 0 to oPrinters.Count - 1 Step 2 On Error Resume Next if Left(oPrinters.Item(i), 3) <> "lpt" And Left(oPrinters.Item(i), 3) <> "usb" And Left(oPrinters.Item(i), 2) <> "HP" then WshNetwork.RemovePrinterConnection oPrinters.Item(i+1), true, true else WScript.Echo "No network printers found" end if Next ' Get the Computer Name sCompPath = oAdSysInfo.ComputerName ' Set the printer dependant on the OU name for the PC if InStr (1, sCompPath, "OU=admincomputers", 1) then WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-CLZR-5250N" WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-MFD-W2330" elseif InStr(1, SCompPath, "OU=laptops", 1) then WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-CLZR-5250N" WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-MFD-W2330" WShNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-MFD-W2330" elseif InStr(1, SCompPath, "OU=room1", 1) then WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-CLZR-5250N" WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-MFD-W2330" WShNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-MFD-W2330" elseif InStr(1, SCompPath, "OU=room2", 1) then WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-CLZR-5250N" WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-MFD-W2330" WShNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-MFD-W2330" elseif InStr(1, SCompPath, "OU=staffroom", 1) then WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-CLZR-5250N" WShNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-MFD-W2330" WShNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter "\\1115-dc-004\LCH-MFD-W2330" else WScript.Echo "A default printer has not been assigned. Please contact ICT support via the helpdesk so that the problem can be resolved" end if Thanks for looking, now back to trying to code!! Ben

Hi all, Just wondering how you go about printer deployment within your schools. Being in a school there are lots of considerations... For example, you need to look at the Organizational Unit of the computer, the user itself, the groups that the user belongs to, etc, etc. So all teachers are a member of the staff group – which gives them the option of the staff room as a printer (this is non-default) Each member of staff belongs to a faculty – if they are in the humanities group, they should also be deployed the humanities printer. Then just to top it off, if they are logging into the network from a computer in the ICT room M4, they should get the M4 MONO option as default and the M4 COLOUR option should also be available. We were originally running a Viglen Classlink 7 based network on Server 2003 which allowed us to use the their “printersetup.exe” tool to do the above. This did work to an extent when it wanted to.... For a few different reasons we have scrapped classlink all together and have since developed our own in house network from scratch but are having issues with deploying printers. We have tried to do it via group policy using pushprinterconnections.exe but this does not seem to be the best way of doing it, and was very hit and miss, despite setting the default printers in gp preferences. How do you do it where you are based? Any comments / suggestions are more than welcome! Thanks, Ed.

This is a common problem. I thought that I've solved it before but now I can't remember how. I feel like I'm re-inventing the wheel. We have computer labs where any domain user can login on any computer and do basic work with Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, and so on. We have a printer in each lab which has an IP address that is only used by the server; the server has the printer installed and shared. We need to install the shared printer once on each computer and have it show up for all users on that computer. Currently, if I login as domain administrator, browse to the server, right-click the printer and click "connect", it installs the printer for administrator but the printer does not show up for other users (whether they have a profile on the computer or have never logged in).

Hey Guys, really could do with some help here... we have migrated our file server over to a new one. I have moved everything over to our new file server and have changed the group policies. But after testing I have noticed issues. Most policies are working and have been picked up by the work stations but the printer mapping policies and the drive mapping policies seem to be not working. I have changed the drive mapping policies to the correct location. But when you go to my computer then click on one of the drives its still trying to connect to the old server (cpssvr01) not the new one (cpssvr1). (see pic) I have tried a GPupdate /force on CMD on the workstation but no luck. I am also having issues trying to change the map printers policy. When trying the change it to the correct printer path I get the following message. (see Pic) any ideas guys? Thanks, Lewis