The Best Damn Windows Server 2003 Book Period- P8 potx

Using Emergency Management Services Emergency Management Services is a new feature in Windows Server 2003 that enables you to remotely manage a server when normal network connectivity ha

Table 2.2 Management Snap-Ins in Computer Management

Computer

Shared Folders View shared folders, open files,

and active sessions Local Users and Groups Manage local user and group

accounts Performance Logs and Alerts Configure performance data logs Device Manager Manage computer hardware

media Disk Defragmenter Defragment local disks Disk Management Configure disk partitions and

volumes Services and Applications DHCP (if installed) Configure the DHCP service for

allocating IP addresses

Management Instrumentation Indexing Service Configure the Indexing Service to

provide fast searches Routing and Remote Access

(if installed) Manage routing and remote

access DNS (if installed) Configure the DNS service

Figure 2.5 Computer Management MMC

Which Tool To Use?

In this section we’ve seen a variety of tools for remotely managing servers How do you decide which one to use in a given situation? It really depends on what you are trying to do and in cases where you can accomplish the same thing with different tools, you might have your favorite tools for administering a server

■ Remote Assistance is really a tool for end users and you are unlikely to use it for remote server management.You should, however, be aware that Remote Assistance invitations can

be sent from a Windows Server 2003 computer, and you should know how to turn off Remote Assistance

■ The Remote Desktop tool is useful when you need to have full control of a single server

Because you are effectively at the server, you can administer any function With the Remote Desktop snap-in, or using RD from the command line, you can even connect to the server console session remotely

■ The Web Interface for Remote Administration is useful in situations where you need to carry out basic tasks when you are away from the corporate network, but still have access

to the Internet It is limited, however, as to which administrative tasks you can carry out

■ The administration tools pack and computer management in conjunction with custom MMCs are likely to be among the tools you use the most, especially if you have to admin-ister a large number of servers.You can put together customized MMCs that contain the snap-ins for tools that you use the most often and for the servers that you have to regularly manage

Using Emergency Management Services

Emergency Management Services is a new feature in Windows Server 2003 that enables you to remotely manage a server when normal network connectivity has failed Under normal conditions, you use the tools described in this and other chapters to manage your server either by being physi-cally present at the server or over the network However, what happens if the network crashes or the server doesn’t boot properly?

Providing the server has the appropriate hardware and firmware, you can remotely manage it without the presence of a local keyboard, mouse, or display.This is called out-of-band or “headless”

operation A key aim of out-of-band management is to get a server that is not working properly back to a normal operating state

A number of situations might require you to resort to out-of-band management:

■ The server has stopped responding to normal network management commands

■ The network card in the server has failed

■ The server hasn’t booted properly

■ The server has been shut down and you need to bring it up again

The extent to which you can use out-of-band management depends on the hardware of your server At the very least, on a server with Windows Server 2003, a serial port and Emergency

Management Services enabled, you can connect a VT100-type terminal or a computer with a ter-minal emulator to the serial port and perform certain tasks using the Special Administration

Console (SAC) However, the server must be up and running to be able to manage it in this way

If you need to be able to manage the server remotely when it has crashed or even switched off, you need special hardware and firmware on the motherboard that provide features such as firmware console redirection.This means that you can monitor the server via the serial port right from the moment it starts up and even check out BIOS settings

Emergency Management Services is not enabled by default, but can be enabled during an instal-lation, an upgrade, or after setup has been completed

Managing Printers and Print Queues

Managing printing, which involves many tasks, is a routine part of almost every administrator’s job and in this section we will examine the tools that you can use to manage your printers

Windows Server 2003 offers a variety of methods for managing printers; these include the Control Panel, the Manage Your Server tool, and command-line tools

Printer management tasks include the following:

■ Creating a printer

■ Sharing a printer

■ Adding printer drivers for earlier operating systems

■ Setting permissions

■ Managing print queues

■ Creating printer pools

■ Scheduling printers

■ Setting printing priorities You can carry out all these tasks using graphical or command-line tools First, we’ll cover how

to carry out these tasks using the graphical interface

Using the Graphical Interface

The Graphical Interface for managing printers and print queues includes a number of tools:

■ Control Panel | Printers and Faxes folder

■ Add Printer Wizard

■ Add Printer Driver Wizard

■ Manage Your Server

The Printers and Faxes folder is where printers defined on the computer are stored.

Configuring the properties of printers in this folder carries out nearly all printer tasks

The Manage Your Server tool enables you to configure various server roles, including the print server role, by using the Configure Your Server Wizard We cover roles later in this chapter.

Here, we’ll examine the key printer management tasks using the graphical interfaces

Creating a Printer

Use the Add Printer Wizard to create a printer by selecting Start | Settings | Printers and

Faxes and clicking the Add Printer icon.

The wizard asks you a series of questions about which port to use, the driver to use, what name

to give the printer, whether it should be shared, optional location and comment information, and whether to print a test page

The port to choose depends on how the printer is physically connected to the computer It might be connected to a serial port, parallel port, or USB port If the printer is connected directly

to the network, you need to use a TCP/IP port and specify the IP address of the printer Usually, if you connect a printer to a USB port, Windows uses Plug and Play to automatically install the printer for you

Printer drivers are used to convert a print job to the specific commands that a print device understands Print devices vary in the command languages that they use; for example, most HP printers use PCL It is therefore very important that you select the correct driver for your printer

Often a new printer comes with an installation CD or disk that contains the driver

After you’ve created a printer, it appears in the Printers and Faxes folder and you can

double-click the printer to change its properties

Sharing a Printer

If you do not share a printer, only the computer on which you create the printer can use it Sharing

a printer makes it available over the network to other computers

To share a printer: highlight it, right-click, and then click Sharing In the Properties dialog box, select Share this printer and choose a share name.This is the name by which the printer will

be known over the network

You need to consider the operating system that the computers using the printer share will be running When you share a printer on a Windows Server 2003 computer, the installed driver is also suitable for Windows XP and Windows 2000 clients When a computer running Windows 2000 or Windows XP connects to the share, it automatically downloads the driver If you have client com-puters running Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 95/98 or Windows Millennium Edition (ME), install additional drivers

Adding Printer Drivers for Earlier Operating Systems

To make a shared printer available to users of computers with earlier operating systems, install the

appropriate driver on the server computer.To do this, select the Sharing tab for the printer and click the Additional Drivers button to load the drivers for earlier operating systems.The benefit

of doing this is that when a computer running, for example, Windows 98 connects to the shared

printer, it downloads the appropriate driver automatically rather than asking the user for the location

of the printer driver

Setting Permissions

Printer permissions control who can print to a printer and whether a user can manage the printer There are three permissions for printers (refer to Table 2.3) and these can be applied to users and groups As with file and folder permissions, printer permissions are cumulative, so if a user has permis-sions to a printer and is also a member of a group that has permispermis-sions, the user will have the cumula-tive effect of the user and group permissions.The exception to this is that if any of the printer

permissions have been denied, the user can never have that permission regardless of any groups that he belongs to Figure 2.6 shows the default permissions on a Windows Server 2003 computer

The Special Permissions permission enables you to fine-tune the security by specifying who

is allowed to read what the permissions are, who can change the permissions and who can take ownership.The person that created it owns a printer and that person can always change permissions

on the printer.To make someone else the owner of a printer, give that user the Take Ownership permission and then get the other user to exercise the Take Ownership option.The user will then

own the printer and can change permissions

Table 2.3 Printer Permissions

Manage Documents Users can pause, resume, restart, delete, and change the

print order of documents submitted by other users However, this permission does not, by itself, enable a user to print to the printer

Manage Printers Users have complete control over the printer and can change

any of its characteristics

Figure 2.6 Default Printer Permissions

Managing Print Queues

You will often need to see what jobs are waiting to print and perhaps to delete some.You accom-plish this via the print queue for a printer.To look at the queue, double-click the printer of interest

In the dialog box that appears you will see a list of jobs waiting to be printed.You can delete or cancel a job by highlighting it and then pressing delete or by highlighting it and then right-clicking

and selecting Cancel.

To cancel all jobs in a queue, highlight the printer, right-click, and select Cancel All

Documents If you have the dialog box for the printer queue open, you can also select Cancel All

Documents from the Printer pull-down menu.

Pausing a print job prevents it from printing but won’t delete it from the queue.You might do this if someone has submitted a very large print job and you want to hold it back until all the other

jobs have printed.To pause a print job, highlight the job, right-click, and then select Pause.To release the job for printing, highlight the job, right-click, and then select Resume.

You can also pause the entire queue, perhaps because the printer has failed or jammed and you want to stop a flood of error messages.To pause a printer, highlight it, right-click, and then select

Pause Printing To restart printing, highlight the printer, right-click, and then select Resume

Printing

Managing Printer Pools

Imagine your printer has become very busy and long queues develop In this situation, rather than replacing the printer with a much more powerful one, you could purchase another identical printer (perhaps saving money) Connect the printer and, instead of creating a new printer queue on the

server, modify the properties of the existing queue on the Ports tab, select Enable Printer Pooling,

and choose the new port that you used to connect the printer (this could be a TCP/IP port)

Whenever a user prints to this queue, the print job is sent to the first printer that is not busy, thus pooling the jobs.You must ensure that the printers you connect are identical, because users cannot control which printer will service their jobs Differences in capabilities between the printers might mean that a job fails to print properly.You should also locate the printers physically close to each other, because users will not know which printer has printed their job

Figure 2.7 The Windows Server 2003 Add Printer Wizard

Scheduling Printers

As well as controlling which users can use a printer, you can also control when they print by using scheduling By setting a schedule, users can still submit jobs at any time, but the jobs will only be printed during the scheduled hours

Consider a scenario where some users print large reports to a printer that is shared by other users With a single printer queue, printing the large report holds up printing for other users.To resolve this, create a second printer queue that points to the same port as the first queue, change the availability time to out-of-office hours and advise users to use the second printer for the large reports and the first queue for shorter jobs

To set a schedule for a printer, highlight it, right-click and select Properties, and then select the Advanced tab.The default is for a printer to be available at all times Figure 2.8 shows an

example of a printer with restricted availability

Setting Printing Priorities

You can use priorities to control the order in which print jobs are processed Normally, jobs are printed in the order in which they are received All printers and print jobs have a priority setting that can be changed.The default priority is 1 but can range from 1 to 99, with 99 being the highest When a print job arrives, its priority setting is the same as the priority of the printer Once in the

queue, the priority setting can be changed by anyone with the Manage Documents permission.

Typically, the priority of a print job will be increased to make it print next despite its position in the queue Note that by changing the default priority of the printer to 50, for example, it is possible to reduce the priority of a job

You can also use priorities to give certain users preferential access to a printer For example, you have a group of managers whose print jobs need to be dealt with before other users.To achieve this, create two print queues pointing to the same printer Let’s say they are called A4 and A4Mgrs

Remove the Print permission for the Everyone group from A4Mgrs and add the Print permission

Figure 2.8 Example of Restricted Printing Hours

to the Managers group.This means that only the managers can use this queue.The final step is to increase the priority on the A4Mgrs print queue, so that the managers’ print jobs get serviced first

Using New Command-Line Tools

Windows Server 2003 introduces a number of command-line-based scripts to manage printers If you have large numbers of printers on your network with many servers, using these new command-line scripts in batch files can save you a lot of time, compared with using the graphical interface

The scripts are written in Visual Basic and have to be run in a command window using cscript,

as in this example: cscript prncnfg.vbs.

It isn’t necessary to include the vbs extension But using cscript is necessary because the default scripting host is wscript (which is for graphical windows-based scripts) and the printer management scripts have been written for the command line.You can change the default scripting host to cscript

by using the command cscript //h:cscript.

If you change the default scripting host, you can run the command-line tools without having to

type cscript each time (however, you will then have to type wscript before any windows-based scripts you run).You might also like to set the option that suppresses the cscript logo.This prevents a couple

of extra lines appearing in the output Figure 2.9 shows the output of the prnjobs script with and without the logo and using the cscript command to suppress the appearance of the logo lines.

Most of the scripts can also be used to manage printers on a remote computer by using the –s computername option If you want to use a script to connect to a remote computer, you might also

need to use the –u username and –w password options to connect as a user who has administrative

privileges on the remote computer

Each script has many options, so use Windows Help or run the script with the /? option to

dis-play additional help on each option

Note that with all these scripts you must leave a space between the option and the argument

For example, you should enter prnport –l –s computername instead of prnport –l –scomputerrname.

Figure 2.9 Using the //nologo Option with cscript

The following list describes each of the new scripts:

■ Prncnfg.vbs Use prncnfg to display or change configuration information about a printer

or rename a printer on a local or remote computer

■ Prndrvr.vbs Use prndrvr to delete, add, or list the printer drivers installed on a local or

remote computer

■ Prnjobs.vbs Use prnjobs to manage print jobs.You can pause, resume, or cancel (delete)

individual print jobs or list all the jobs in a print queue on a local or remote computer

Note that prnjobs is used to manage individual print jobs, not the whole queue.To manage

a queue, use prnqctl.

■ Prnmngr.vbs Use prnmngr to add and delete printers, list printers, and to display or change the default printer Some of the options for prnmngr work only on the local

com-puter

■ Prnport.vbs Use prnport to manage TCP/IP ports.You can display or change

configura-tion informaconfigura-tion, create, delete, or list TCP/IP ports on a local or remote computer

■ Prnqctl.vbs Use prnqctl to manage a printer queue.You can pause or resume printing of

jobs in the queue, cancel all print jobs in the queue, or print a test page

Table 2.4 shows the main options for each script Note that you will need to include additional options over and above what is shown in Table 2.4 to specify the particular printer, driver, port, and

so on that is to be affected.Table 2.5 shows the command to use for each of the common printer management tasks

Table 2.4 Options for Printer Management Scripts

Script and Options Use

Prncnfg -g Display configuration information for a printer

Prndrvr -l List installed printer drivers

Prndrvr -a Install a printer driver

Prndrvr -d Delete a printer driver

Prnmngr -l List all the printers on a computer

Prnport -g Display configuration information for a TCP/IP port

Continued

Table 2.4 Options for Printer Management Scripts

Script and Options Use

Prnport -t Change configuration information for a TCP/IP port

Prnport -a Create a TCP/IP port

Prnport -d Delete a TCP/IP port

Prnqctl -m Resume printing of the queue

Prnqctl -x Cancel all print jobs in the queue

Table 2.5 Example of Commands for Printer Management Tasks

Create a printer prnmngr –a –p printername –m drivername –r portname Share a printer prncnfg –t –p printername –h sharename +shared Add a printer driver prndrvr -a -m drivername -v versionnumber –e environment

Manage print queues prnjobs or prnqctl Create printer pools Not available Schedule printers prncnfg –t –p printername –st starttime –ut endtime Set printer priorities prncnfg –i prioritynumber

The Printer Spooler Service

All printing is managed by the spooler service If this service is not running, users cannot print.The

spooler has a number of configuration options.To change these, open the Printers and Faxes folder and select Server Properties from the File pull-down menu.This opens the Print Server

Properties dialog box containing four tabs: Forms, Ports, Drivers, and Advanced, which are

used as follows:

■ Use the Forms tab to define custom paper sizes.

■ Use the Ports tab to define new ports (especially TCP/IP ports) and to configure

proper-ties of existing ports

■ Use the Drivers tab to add new drivers or configure existing drivers.

■ Use the Advanced tab to modify the behavior of the spooler service.

In particular, note the Spool Folder under the Advanced tab.This location is where print jobs

are stored until they are printed On larger networks with many printers the spool folder can get quite large