Tài liệu Print Services pdf

On Windows 2000 clients, the drivers get downloaded at every print job.Using the driver for the target printer, the GDI renders the document in theprinter language of the physical printe

Print Services

This chapter covers everything you need to know about

the Windows 2000 printing service Despite all of ourefforts to create a paperless office, printers are not goingaway And for all intents and purposes, for good or for evil,printers are becoming more sophisticated, cheaper, and easier to use every day

New technologies like e-mail and the World Wide Web havenot done much to alleviate the need for printers Instead theyhave often succeeded in shifting the burden of hardcopy out-put from the sender to the receiver These days, even attor-neys e-mail you contracts — and then ask you to print themout, sign, and return them

The network operating system lives and dies by its ability

to host access to printers The print service is the third leg

of the “stool” that makes up a network operating system

Without it, a network OS simply falls over Windows 2000 hasinherited a rich and robust printing service, culled from years

of R&D and the experiences of over a hundred million users

It may seem like installing printers and printing is a brainer For the large part it is — until the printer stops print-ing You need to have a good understanding of the elementsand components of Windows networking services to trou-bleshoot this vital facility

no-As an administrator, you need to understand the logical ronment in order to troubleshoot printer problems effectively

envi-Therefore, we’ll start by introducing the components thatmake printing actually happen Later, we’ll discuss installingprinters, and you’ll find that the properties and parametersyou set up will mean more to you Finally, you’ll be able toexplore print service troubleshooting, once you’re equippedwith the fundamentals

In This Chapter

Installing andManaging PrintersAdding, Setting Up,and PublishingPrintersSharing Printers,Permissions, andOwnershipStrategies forEffectively Managingand TroubleshootingPrinter Services

You should understand that the components we’ll discuss now are extremely plex objects and APIs that make up the Windows 2000 (actually, it’s still NT) printservice In this book, our purpose is to provide you with enough information tovisualize the components, and therefore be able to solve printing problems inWindows 2000 environments in an effective manner.

com-Understanding Windows 2000 Printer Services

To help you avoid getting hung up on terminology and concepts later, you shouldprobably look at the printer services from two different points of view — the logicalenvironment and the physical environment The logical environment is an abstrac-tion of the physical device that the user sees It includes the software required tointerface to the physical environment The physical environment represents thedevices out of which the final printed medium (usually paper) emerges

Printer Services: The Logical Environment

First of all, printers have no user interface other than a cryptic keypad and a smallLCD screen Their job is to receive data and to convert the data into information that

a printer’s electronics understands The printer language or software lays out thepage according to specifications in the data and goes about the task of sending thisinformation out to the physical parts that print the images onto a hard medium

So if you are not able to print, and all the logical printer components check out, theonly course of action, once a faulty printer has been detected, is to ship it back tothe factory or call a service technician (assuming you know little about coronawires, drums, and hoppers) For the most part, you need only know how to turn the printer or plotter on and off, change toner and paper, connect its interfacecables, and clean it

Windows 2000, on the other hand, is both printer-aware and user-aware Its task is

to provide a logical printer interface that users can see and managers can manageand troubleshoot, as well as a holistic printer spooling and pooling environment.The logical printer, represented by the printer object, its icons, and properties, isrepresentative of the hardware The printer icon, or the printer share, is all knowl-edge workers need to know about printing

You can install logical printers on your client computers (local printers), but most

of the time the logical printers are installed on servers dedicated to hosting logical

printers (network printers).

The following list describes the basic user procedure to connect to and use aprinter:

1 Install a logical local or remote printer you have access to (the installation is

persistent)

2 Once connected, you can manage certain properties of the logical printer,

such as paper size and layout, bins and trays, resolution and color, number

of pages and copies, and so on

3 You, or at least your users, then print documents and graphics to the logical

printer The action of printing is often called a job The job encapsulates

print-ing instructions for the printer service, tellprint-ing the logical printer how the jobshould be printed to the physical printer When a client application prints adocument or image, the application calls the Windows graphic device inter-face (GDI), which loads the driver for the target printer (The driver is down-loaded from the server if it does not exist on the client machine On Windows

2000 clients, the drivers get downloaded at every print job.)Using the driver for the target printer, the GDI renders the document in theprinter language of the physical printer Once complete, the GDI then calls thelocal spooler, hands off the jobs, and closes At this point, the GDI’s work isdone, and the client computer sends the job to the print server, via a routingservice The routing service transports the print job over the network usingthe remote procedure call service, the NetBIOS redirector, or other service (in the case of Unix ,OS/2, and so on)

4 The logical printer, also called the printer service or client spooler, once it has

received the job from a print router or other interface, also loads the sary driver, which tells it how to interface to the physical printer and how tosend it the document This is done via the services of print providers and processors

neces-5 The print processor checks the job’s data types and alters them or leaves

them alone depending on the requirements and the data types received Theprint processor makes sure the jobs print correctly

6 If the data types call for separator page processing, the jobs are handed off

to the separator page processor The separator page is added to the front ofthe job

7 Meanwhile, as the printer administrator, you’ll manage the logical printer’s

properties (the logical printer is an object), such as where it resides on thenetwork, who has access to it, when they can use it, and so on

The printer service, illustrated in Figure 23-1, includes several components andconcepts, which are described in the following sections

Figure 23-1: The Windows 2000 Print Service represented as

a stack of services

Print routers

Print routers sit between the client application and the print server (which can also

be on the local machine, if printing to the parallel or serial port) The first job of therouter is to route print jobs to the correct servers and print services The secondjob of the router, once the target server is found, is to make sure the client has thecorrect driver for the job The router will check the target server’s driver with theclient’s, and if the client’s driver is older or absent, the router will update the driver

on the client machine

Routers are usually Win32 services In other words, they cater to Windows printing.All other network clients, such as UNIX, OS/2, Midrange systems, and the Macenvironment, get their jobs to the Windows 2000 print service via APIs that inter-face directly with the server service stack

Printer drivers

These are the first variable components you are asked to provide when setting uplogical printers Printer drivers are the software components that are sent to theuser’s software to allow it to create print jobs according to the capabilities of thetarget printers

Printer drivers are built for specific printers or printer families For example, youneed a printer driver for jobs printed to the Hewlett Packard LaserJet III printersand different drivers for jobs printed to LaserJet 4 and LaserJet 5 printers respec-tively However, LaserJet 4 and 5 drivers will be able to print standard jobs printed

to the LaserJet III printers, but the older LaserJet III printers may not print a plex job generated by the LaserJet 4 or 5 driver

com-Printer drivers are installed when you install and configure logical printing devices

You can also select alternative drivers after the logical printer has been installed

This is discussed later in this chapter

Printer drivers are stored in the \system32\spool\drivers\folder Informationabout the drivers is stored in the Registry of the hosting machine

The drivers are grouped into raster printer drivers, which include the PCL standardand dot matrix printers and PostScript printer drivers, which are typically used forhigh-end graphics and publishing applications, the domain of the Apple/Mac com-puters and printers

The spooler service stack

The spooler service is an engine — a collection of libraries — that controls each andevery print job on a machine It’s best described as a stack starting with a routerservice that can receive jobs handed off from client processes (see Figure 23-1)

Once into the stack, the job is passed down to the print processor for renderingand then finally passed down to the Print Monitor for transmission to the I/O ports

on the physical interfaces at either local or remote ports

The spooler is also the service that controls client and server printer management,installation and administration of logical printers, and more From the user’s point

of view, and for all intents and purposes, it’s the functionality that exists behind theicons to which users send their print jobs Each Windows 2000 machine has onespooler service

The spooler lives under the control of the service control manager It can be stoppedand started at any time You need only shut down the spooler service (using the netstop spoolercommand) to stop all printing services on a machine The spooler ispart of the Win32 subsystem and is never deleted or relocated It’s owned by thelocal system account, and a number of child processes and services depend on it

The spooler service is also responsible for client-side printer management In fact,when you stop the service, the machine can’t request or send print jobs to the logi-cal shared printers on a server machine In other words, the spooler service acts asboth a client or server service as needed

The spooler service creates the files (spool jobs or files) in the directory where

it resides The service and files are installed by default in the \winnt\system32\spool\printers folder So if your server hosts a large number of print jobs, youshould consider redirecting the print jobs to a volume dedicated to servicing printers Changing the path value in the printer’s Registry key does this The key

in question is:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers

And the value is a drive letter and subfolder path, not the UNC path Once the valuehas changed, you need to stop and restart the print service You can also set upseparate folders for each printer’s job, and this is discussed next

The spooler output files

These are the files that are generated by the spooler service (specifically the printprovider component) for each job it handles Once the job has been sent to theprinter successfully, the spooler files are deleted The spooler output files consist

of two types of files: the spool file and the shadow file They serve the followingpurpose:

✦ Spool file: This file has the splextension and is the print job — what getssent to the printer

✦ Shadow file: This file has the shdextension It contains the informationneeded for the print job, and is useful only to the print service components

It contains information related to the job’s position in the queue, the owner

of the job, the destination printer, and so on

To redirect the spool files for each printer to a separate volume or folder, changethe target printer’s default spool directory key The key in question is:

man-Figure 23-2: Changing the spool directory for a printer

If you manage a lot of printers, redirecting each printer’s spool files to a separatefolder can make it easier to manage the printer queue from the command line Itmay happen that a print job hangs for some reason, and one of the first places tobegin your diagnostics is in the print queue If the queue receives the file from theuser, you can be sure that part of the process, the client spooler service, is not theproblem Your next job would be to figure out why the job is sitting in the queuegoing nowhere

The print processor

The print processor is the winprint.dllfile that resides in the \system32\

spool\prtprocs\w3286folder The job of this library of functions is to take theprint job data sent by the spooler and render it into data the printer can under-stand (or not render, if it already is in a format the printer can understand) Mostprint jobs won’t require any intervention by the print processor, unless you havepeculiar output requirements

The default data type spooled to printers by the processor is NT EMF, which can

be handled by most printers EMF stands for Enhanced Metafile Format, and mostprinters can read it You won’t have to intervene and change the print processorlibraries very often because, firstly, the client applications decide the data type to

be sent to the processor and, secondly, you can’t choose or force a job to be dled by any particular print processor This work is handled automatically

han-Windows 2000 comes with built-in print processors The one installed by default isknown as Winprint, and it handles the standard data types printed by Windows appli-cations Another important print processor is SFMPSPRT, which is the Macintoshprint processor, which handles jobs sent to PostScript printers The Macintosh print

processor is installed when you install Macintosh services on the host machine.Winprint can handle the following data types.

✦ NT EMF ver 1.00x EMF stands for Enhanced Metafile Format These files can

be printed to most printers

✦ RAW Any job that comes out as this data type indicates to the print

proces-sor that nothing further need be done to print the document

✦ RAW (FF appended) This type forces the print processor to check if a form

feed has been added to the end of the job — to ensure that the last page exitsthe printer

✦ RAW (FF auto) This type does not issue a form feed, and the print processor

adds it to the end of the job automatically

✦ TEXT This data type is usually issued for printers that do not accept direct

text The print processor will render the text to meet the needs of the targetprinter

The Macintosh print processor, SFMPSPRT, renders jobs to non-postscript printersfor the benefit of Mac clients However, the output is limited to the very basic

“playout” (to use a Mac-DTP phrase for sending a job to the printer) The defaultdata type is PSCRIPT1, which is a Windows bitmap format that will print to thenon-postscript printers The best you can do for Mac clients is to install PostScriptprinters (or face the wrath of the Mac maniacs), which will provide the high reso-lution and graphics capabilities DTP publishers will require, regardless if the client

is Mac or Windows or Linux

Ports

The term port is loosely used to refer to the hardware connections that allow a data

stream to flow from one device or media to another Print servers and printer face equipment use ports to represent network and cable connections Ports areassigned network addresses and sit between the printer and the spooler service

inter-We will deal with server ports later in the chapter

Print monitors

Print monitors are important components to understand They are soft devices thatcontrol the transmission process of the print jobs to the I/O ports on the devicesthat interface with the physical printer Windows 2000 supports several standardprint monitors Print monitors perform the following tasks in the print service:

✦ They open up a connection between the print processor and the port Theconnection is then used to transfer the data to the I/O ports of the physicalprinter or remote printer interface In essence, they touch the actual ports atthe interfaces on the remote print servers or printer interface devices

✦ They monitor the print job for error messages, progress, and completion

Note

The print monitor essentially monitors the entire print job and reports status back

to the spooler If a print job times out, for whatever reason, the monitor notifies thespooler, and the spooler sends a message to the client

Several print monitors are built into Windows 2000 You can see the list whenattempting to create a new port for the job data connection Unfortunately, Windows

2000, like its predecessor, tends to create confusion between the monitor type andthe actual I/O port, as illustrated in Figure 23-3

Figure 23-3: The Ports tab on

the Properties dialog box

Why is it so important to understand the role of the monitor? It’s usually the firstcomponent in the print service stack that alerts you to a frequent reason for printproblems — inability to communicate with the local or remote port If the printmonitor reports a problem connecting to a remote port, then you have a networkproblem (IP, IPX/SPX, or lower on the network stack) Usually, a trip to the printerwill find the network cable kicked out of the network drop or the interface unit

The following monitors come bundled with Windows 2000

Local print monitor

The local print monitor (localmon.dll) manages the following ports:

✦ Parallel Interface: This interface caters to print jobs that are sent to the

par-allel port on the computer initiating the job Every machine supports parpar-allel

port printing You choose this monitor when you set up a local printer

con-nected directly to the host The local printer can also be shared, which makes

it a network printer

✦ Serial Interface: This interface provides the same service as the parallel

inter-face The data, however, is transmitted through the serial interface, a nications port (such as COM1 or COM2), instead of the parallel interface.Serial interfacing is not common on printers

commu-✦ File: This interface allows you to spool the job to a file name The job is

identi-cal to jobs that are spooled directly to print interfaces, loidenti-cal or network Theoption of wrapping up the data into a file allows you to relocate the file toanother system for printing In other words, the physical printer does nothave to be present or locatable on your network to be of service

This option is convenient if you do not actually own or have access to the get physical printer If you need to print to very expensive printers, such asthe Linotronic typesetters and heavy-duty PostScript printers run by servicebureaus and printing companies, you can print the job to a file and then sendthe file to the service via the Internet or on a disk All you need to do is installthe driver for the target printer (By the way, PostScript print files are binary.)

tar-LPR print monitor (TCP/IP printing)

As soon as you put some distance between the physical printers and the computersfrom which you are requesting the print service, you establish a network-printingenvironment The protocol suite of choice for a heterogeneous computing/printingenvironment is TCP/IP, and you would be well advised to aim for a homogenousTCP/IP printer network In particular, the LPR and LPD (Line Printer Daemon) ser-vice is used as a standard for TCP/IP printing It was derived from the Berkley UNIXstandards

Windows 2000 supports LPR/LPD printing with the services of the LPR/LPD ronment (lpd.exe) and the LPR print monitor (lprmon.dll) The LPR monitor isinstalled by default when you install Windows 2000 If you install Services for UNIX,additional TCP/IP printing support is added to the printing system to support print-ers connected to Unix servers

envi-The LPR port can be used for all TCP/IP printing environments, especially for necting to remote printer interface devices that do not support a custom TCP/IPdaemon or service You can also use the LPR service to connect to printers hangingoff the local ports of UNIX computers and big iron, like VAX, MVS, and AS/400.The LPR/LPD facilities are provided by the TCP/IP Print Server service, which is

con-installed when you install Windows 2000 Typing LPR at the Command Prompt will

return several Command Line commands for LPR printing

Standard TCP/IP print monitor

Windows 2000 also installs a standard TCP/IP print monitor that will let you create

a port to any network interface device or printer that supports IP

Third-party print monitors

Third-party monitors may need to be loaded when you install printers that requirecustom or proprietary print monitors All printer manufacturers create print moni-tors that can be installed into the printer service at any time, post-installation ofWindows 2000 These include the following legacy print monitors:

✦ Digital’s Print Monitor: Note the apostrophe after Digital The possessive

denotes that the monitor is technology belonging to Digital EquipmentCorporation (or DEC, which is now part of Compaq, Inc.) and not “digital”

as in binary, which is a common presumption

The Digital print monitor is not installed as a default monitor and ships withDEC products, such as the DEColorwriter It requires the DECnet protocolfrom Digital, which runs atop TCP/IP, typical of the network protocol tomfool-ery of the last century

✦ Hewlett Packard’s Print Monitors: The older Hewlett Packard monitor talks

to HP’s printers and plotters and JetDirect devices This monitor requires theDLC protocol be added to the network services The old HP monitor is essen-tially useless because it does not support TCP/IP In the event you need toinstall it, possibly to allow the server to cater to printing from the mainframeand mid-range environments, you need to remember that DLC is not a routableprotocol The server and printer will need to be on the same network segment

The JetDirect print monitor is a new technology that can use several cols, including TCP/IP and IPX/SPX The JetDirect print monitor is installedduring installation of the JetDirect printer drivers and management software

proto-You can route IP print job packets to a JetDirect card anywhere on the planet

✦ Lexmark Print Monitor: Another big printer manufacturer is Lexmark.

Windows 2000 supports both Lexmark DLC and TCP/IP print monitors

✦ Macintosh Print Monitor: This monitor (SFMMON) is installed

automati-cally when you install Services for Macintosh and the AppleTalk protocol

AppleTalk is all you need to print to Apple printers and other PostScript printers And you get the full features of the PostScript printer environments,including high resolution, color, separations, and more

Printer Services: The Physical Environment

To use Windows 2000 printer services, you need a computer that can act as a hostfor the services If you support a large network, it would be a good idea to dedicate

a server to the role of printer server

All of the Windows 2000 operating systems support printer server services Theonly difference is the degree of availability The servers (Standard, Advanced, andData Center) are designed to host a large amount of connections, while Windows

2000 Professional is restricted to no more than ten concurrent connections (as wasits predecessor, Windows NT Workstation 4) Advanced Server and Data CenterServer allow you to cluster the printer service for maximum availability.

Here’s a good rule of thumb for determining the hardware resources you’ll need for

a print server Experience has shown us over the years that the size of the company

or group has little to do with how much hardware you need to throw at print vices For instance, we manage small insurance companies that print five times theamount of documents that the big departments at our larger clients do However,you should consider the following “street” rules:

ser-✦ If you can determine that RAM will hold 10MB of print data at any given time,provide at least 30MB for expansion

✦ Provide three to five times more hard disk space for print spools and queues

or allow the volumes to be easily extended (see Chapter 16) This might behard for you to determine when first setting up the print service on a server,but you can easily predict your needs If all your users are printing concur-rently — or at least within a few minutes of each other — total up the size of alltheir documents in the spool folders These documents sit in the spooler onthe hard disk until the service sends them to the printer, so provide at leastthree times more hard disk space than the total of all document sizes sent tothe printer You never know when someone will decide to send the entire taxrulebook of the Internal Revenue Service to the printer, over the weekend

✦ Printing is also a demanding service At one of our clients, we have as many

as 40 printers on one server alone, so it makes sense to make sure the printserver machine has a processor to be proud of

✦ Color printing or printing complicated graphics needs a lot of processor width A dedicated server should service these needs, especially in terminalenvironments

band-Print servers

Several hardware components combine to complete the printing system nately, the names of the components do not always mean the same thing to every-one The print server, in our book, is a computer that “serves” printer interfaces tousers on the network as earlier discussed Printer interfaces (logical printers) areestablished on the server and act as representatives or portals to the printerseither on the network or attached directly to the parallel ports of the computer

Unfortu-Print devices

A print device is what Microsoft calls the physical printer hardware If you ask your

user where his or her print device is, he or she will probably draw a blank, but theterm seems to have become a Microsoft standard To stay on the same page as your

customers, you should stick with printer and forget trying to overcomplicate things

with redundant phrases

Local printers are connected directly to the parallel or serial ports of computers,while network printers can interface directly to the network with the help of net-work interface components The components can be network interface devices ornetwork interface cards (NICs) built directly into the printer

Network interface devices

The makers of these interface boxes say they have a claim to the term print server,

and some even stamp “print server” on their product Rather, refer to them bytheir brand names, such as Lantronix box or JetDirect card — it will result in lessexplaining

These guys are very useful and exist for several reasons:

✦ They obviate the need to hook up a computer parallel port to every printer inthe office Instead, the printer cable is attached to a parallel port on the box,which attaches to the network via a network interface port

✦ In large companies, the print servers (computers) are locked away in cooledserver rooms, and the printers are either located near their users or in printingrooms The interface device allows the printer and the print server computer

to co-exist some distance away from each other At one of our clients, we port label printers in many distribution centers that are installed at loadingdocks and bays where food is packed and shipped We would not want tolocate an expensive Pentium or AS/400 at every dock just to print labels

sup-✦ They provide a network interface to the printer, allowing you to place aprinter at any convenient location where you have a network drop

✦ They support a variety of networks, such as Token Ring and Ethernet, andalso support all the most popular protocols, especially TCP/IP

✦ They come packed with smart electronics and embedded software that willallow you to manage their network protocols, such as assigning networkaddresses, printing capability, and communications with the printer Theycome equipped with terminal access and daemons for remote management

You can telnet into them or even access their internals from a Web browser

✦ They allow you to connect more than one printer to the network at a singlenetwork drop and address (many printers on one IP or IPX address) Theinterface directs the inbound job to an IP port assigned to the printer

(Remember that standard TCP/IP supports up to 65,536 ports.)

✦ They come with built-in memory to further queue documents sent by the server

These interfaces are very useful, inexpensive, and compact Keep them hidden out

of harm’s way, such as under the printer, in a printer cabinet, or behind the printerstand We have a collection of dead Lantronix boxes, each no bigger than a pack ofWest Virginia’s filtered finest, which have been tortured with butts, coffee, kicking,and electric shock They also have a habit of going into indefinite seclusion, never

to be seen or heard of again

Print Services Strategy

Providing print services to the enterprise should be a well-planned exercise.Although it appears easy enough to install printers, it makes sense to createblueprints or policy governing printer installation, usage, access, naming, adminis-tration, and more

Often, you will arrive at a company only to find that your predecessor knew his or herprinting environment like a palm tree knows where its coconuts fall Troubleshootingsuch environments is almost impossible, and you would be best to scrap what youinherited and start all over again Your best course of action would be to create a newlogical printer environment and then move users to the new environment in phases.The following guidelines for setting up a strategic print service plan are a start

Printer Taxonomy

Recall earlier that the printers that users print to are not the actual printer devices,but logical printers set up in Windows 2000, and these printers can thus go by sev-eral aliases You will learn later that one physical print device can be used by sev-eral groups that will “map” to the printer as different shares, targeting differentaliases You need to set up a consistent and practical naming scheme or convention

to cater to a varied user environment

It’s not important if you already have hundreds of printers set up all over the place

or if the job of printer admin recently became your responsibility; if you do nothave a naming scheme for your printers, now is the time to create one A large com-pany might have as many as 1,000 physical printers plugged in all over the place,and their logical printer namespace may contain as many as 1,500 names

The scheme should be simple Put HP in all Hewlett Packard printer names, Xe in all Xerox printer names, Ne in NEC printer names, and so on For example: HP5LSI_MIS1

is the share name for the main MIS Hewlett Packard 5LSI printer And the nameHP5LSI_MIS2 might be the same printer shared for after-hour use

Keep the names simple and try not to leave blank spaces, such as HP MIS1b Blankspaces make it difficult for advanced users or administrators to map to printers

from the command line using the net usecommand Names with spaces need to

be enclosed between quotes and that wastes time Rather, use underscores to resent spaces in the name

rep-Also try to keep the name as short as possible The name does not need to explainlife itself You can be as descriptive as you need in the description fields and in theActive Directory, as we’ll soon discover We have seen printer names you need acipher to read If the admin can’t shout the name across the room or over the tele-phone — “you need to map to HP_MIS1b” — then the name is too complex Considerthis e-mail recently received from an associate in a sister company: “You can sendthe reports to $_IKY14_T_MAT_MGT5.” This “fifth” printer allegedly belonged to thematerials management group on the 14th floor of the “Tier” building somewhere inKentucky

Easy share names also work well for users In our accounting department, wenamed all our printers HP_ACT1 to HP_ACT12 The ACT is short for accounting, but

it did not take long before our users associated the printers with Shakespeare

Create Print Groups

Here we go again reminding you not to give share access or permissions to uals (in permissions and access control), but rather to work with groups Even ifthe printer belongs to a group of one person, you never know when someone elseneeds to print to the same printer A good example is an executive who has a per-sonal printer in his or her office So, you create the logical printer in Windows 2000and add only the name of the executive to the printer object’s access control list

individ-But what happens when the assistant needs to print to that printer? If a group hasaccess, then the assistant can be added to the group

Using groups in access control and permissions makes for effective printer ment Under our corporate policy of controlled access, groups are given only theaccess they need to certain printers at certain times and for certain jobs Webelieve it wise to resist giving the Everyone group access to all the printers theycan find on the network That could lead to many disasters We’ve seen stuff like auser sending ten copies of a 1,500-page report to a small printer that could not han-dle the job, and thus causing urgent smaller documents to wait indefinitely for achance to get to the printer If you plan this well, you won’t have to spend half yourlife deleting and purging failed jobs from print queues

manage-Not too long ago, we received a call from the CEO’s assistant saying he sent a highlysecret document to the wrong printer, which he couldn’t find — anxiety was mount-ing We found the document before it printed by tracing the queues and looking forhis call sign (ownership) Now the CEO can only print to a printer that does notspecifically deny him access

Controlling access to printers is discussed later in this chapter

Create a Print Network

Creating a print network, used exclusively for printers, is a worthwhile exercise Ithelps keep other devices and machines from invading the printer’s address spaceand makes it easier to manage the printer requirement Here are some points toconsider:

✦ TCP/IP: The protocol of choice for most printer networks is TCP/IP If

possi-ble, you should stick to one network protocol Managing a network of morethan one protocol will add dollars to your total cost of ownership Most mod-els and makes support TCP/IP Even modern PostScript printers can beassigned an IP address, even though AppleTalk drives them Older printersand environments (like VMS, MVS, NetWare, and so on) prefer to talk LAT, IPX,Pathworks, and so on, but for a Windows 2000 print network, you may as wellintroduce Klingon into the school syllabus

✦ Subnet: Organizations with a large amount of printers would do well creating

one or more subnets exclusively for printers One Class C subnet would cater

to 254 printers or more on printer interface devices, which would probably bemore than enough addresses for a company of 3,000 paper monkeys If youmanage a number of interconnected offices or sites on a WAN, then reserving

a block of addresses out of the Class C (say 10 or 20) on the site should fice You don’t need to add a second subnet to the site just for a bushel ofprinters; it will only add stress to the routing and replication bandwidth onwhich DNS and Active Directory depend

suf-✦ DHCP: Make sure the printer IP address range does not get used by DHCP.

This is easily handled by reserving the block of addresses in the DHCP service(see Chapter 11)

Keep Drivers Current

The print routers in Windows 95, 98 (with the latest service packs), NT, and 2000clients are able to receive the printer driver from the server every time they make

a connection Make sure that you keep current and available the printer drivers forevery make and model of printer you deploy Windows 2000 ships with more than2,500 drivers, so the library on the disk is more than sufficient (although there were

no drivers for our Zebra printers, as discussed later)

There are two good reasons why this is an important task:

✦ Staying current: By regularly updating the drivers, you ensure that users

always have access to the latest feature the drivers publish and that you havemaintenance releases that fix earlier release defects Printer drivers becomeout-of-date very quickly You can keep drivers current by downloading themfrom the Internet using the Windows Update service, explained in the firstchapter

✦ Availability: Making sure servers hold and keep current printer drivers for

every printer you deploy will ensure that whenever a client connects to aprinter (an old or new logical printer) the latest driver will be available Thiskeeps printing delays to a minimum and the volume of support calls down

Installing and Setting up Printers

When you install printers on a server, they will usually be installed as local printersprinting to remote TCP/IP ports Local printers, by definition, are printers thatcoexist with a server, which acts as its proxy Local printers are shared like files and folders so that groups of users may map to them and use their services

Just because the physical printer is established out on the network somewhere doesnot make it a network printer; it must still be installed as a local printer (remember,you are installing a logical printer) Installing the network printer option does notmake your server a proxy for the printer It only gives you the ability to connect toand print from the remote network printer Installing a network printer only makesyou another client, and that is not our objective

Before you begin installing a new local printer, there are a number of parametersand data you will need handy:

1 If you have a TCP/IP printer network, as most organizations now have, assign

the new IP address for the remote port, be it on a printer interface device or

on the printer itself Make sure the DHCP server reserves the IP address andmark the IP address as assigned on an IP address allocation list or databaseyou keep

2 If you are setting up a port on a remote printer interface device, make up a

network name for the device The name can be derived from the name of the device given by the manufacturer, a serial number, and even a MAC (hardware) address

3 Have all printer drivers handy If you do not maintain an install directory

on the server, as explained in Chapter 5, you may need your Windows 2000Server install CDs within arm’s reach

Installing the Local Printer

Follow these steps to install a local printer:

1 Log on to the Print Server computer as a member of the Administrators

group You can do this from the console or log on over a terminal session

2 Select ➪ Start ➪ Settings ➪ Printers The Printers folder loads, as illustrated in

Figure 23-4

Figure 23-4: The Printers folder

3 Double-click the Add Printer icon This will launch the Add Printer Wizard.

Click Next to arrive at your first totally confusing screen The Wizard asks you

to install a local or network printer, but describes the “Local printer” as beingdirectly connected to the computer Forget that useless advice The printerserver can be connected directly to your server, or your server can be inLittle Rock, Arkansas, USA, and the printer can be in Zululand, Natal, SouthAfrica As mentioned earlier, only choose Network Printer if the printer youare installing is not going to be serviced by the local computer as its printerserver, host, or proxy

4 Choose the Plug and Play option if you are setting up a PnP printer for the

first time Choosing this option for a printer that is already installed wastestime because PnP discovery takes longer than you knowing what driver is onthe system or on the CD in your hand

5 Next, we come to the Port Selection page If the printer is indeed installed in

Zululand, you will need an IP address for the port on the printer or on theprint device interface box to which your Zulu printer is connected Note thatyou can also choose a parallel port (the LPT port) or a COM port if the printeractually is connected to the server computer with a data cable

For demo purposes, let’s assume the printer is a Zebra printer located 9,000miles away in Zululand In this case, we need to create an LPR port and assign

it the IP address you have handy (If you do not have the IP address handy,you will have to stop everything and go and get it.)

6 Click Next, and the LPR-compatible printer dialog box loads You are prompted

to provide a name or IP address for the port If at all possible, provide the IPaddress, because name resolution just slows things down (the IP addressshould be permanently assigned to this port in any event)

Also provide the name, as we also requested you do earlier The far-awayZebra printer is hanging off a Lantronix computer, so the typical name we’lluse identifies the port as being on a Lantronix printer “server.” This is illus-trated in Figure 23-5.

Figure 23-5: Adding an LPR port

7 Because we discussed the function of the print monitor earlier, you will note

here that the LPR print monitor immediately tries to touch the remote IPaddress The message illustrated in Figure 23-6 pops up if the IP address orremote server does not respond to a test packet sent by the monitor At thispoint, you can choose to abandon the installation in order to test the IPaddress or the remote device, or you can carry on regardless with the setupand return to the troubleshooting later Either option will get you back to thesame point It’s not much of a deal to return later to change the IP address orother settings, as demonstrated later

Figure 23-6: An LPR port error

There could be several reasons for this message

a The IP address might be bad, or unreachable You should troubleshoot

the address (using ping, tracert, and other TCP/IP tools described inChapter 12)

b If the address is valid, then the interface device may not be working

properly You will need to diagnose that problem with the tools that shipwith the device

c The device may not be connected to the network Or it may be connected

but not have power Whatever the reason, you will need to have someone

at the remote site troubleshoot the device Many interface devices allowyou to connect to the printer and dump, or print setup and diagnosticsinformation to the printer This will tell you if the device has the correct

IP address installed and if the device is working properly Many modernprinters also have the ability to print out configuration and address infor-mation If the device is set up with the wrong IP address, as is usually thecase, then a simple change will get your device installed and working

8 Click Next to load the printer driver for the printer from the manufacturer list,

illustrated in Figure 23-7 If the printer you are installing is not in the list (Figure23-7 indicates the absence of Zebra printers), you will need to get the driverfrom the Internet or from a CD that ships with the printer Click Next after you have selected the driver If the driver is already installed on the system,Windows will prompt you accordingly to replace or use the existing driver

Figure 23-7: The manufacturer’s list of printers

9 Click Next to name the printer, as illustrated in Figure 23-8 Remember what

we said earlier about name consistency In the illustration, the name denotes aZebra printer for the “shipping” group

10 Click Next to share the printer; then click Next to provide information about

the location and use of the printer This is demonstrated in Figure 23-9

Figure 23-8: Naming the

logical printer

Figure 23-9: Location and

Comment information

11 Finally, you can choose to print a test page Do it Click the test page but do not

use the troubleshooter In other words, respond YES to the prompt asking if thetest page printed correctly, even if you have no idea what came out at the otherside, halfway across the planet It’s not that we don’t trust the troubleshooter If

we agreed that the test page did not print, we would not be wasting time linking our way around the help system After you’ve troubleshot severalprinter problems, the troubleshooter becomes a waste of time The test page ismore useful as a means of sending a document to the printer without having toleave the printer configuration to send a page You can then check the queue ofthe printer If the test page has not printed after a few minutes, you need totroubleshoot Meanwhile, your new printer service is installed

hyper-A local printer has now been installed Before we allow access to it, we need to still

do some fine-tuning