1. Open your Web browser.
Figure 13.36The Device Settings Tab of a Printer’s Properties
2. Go to the address http://computername/printers, where computername equals the name of your computer.
3. This will give you the all printer Web page. From this page, you can mange your printer, including pausing and resuming printing and deleting jobs from the print queue. Connect to the printer by clicking Connect under Printer Actions.
There are some requirements to using Web-based printing. First, IIS must be installed on the computer functioning as the print server. Clients must be using Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher. IIS is installed from the Control Panel. Open the Control Panel and double-click the Add/Remove Programs icon.
From the Add or Remove Programs window, click Add/Remove Windows Components.You will now be given the Windows Components Wizard window. Check the box next to IIS and click Next to continue. If you want to customize the installation of IIS, you must make sure that the printer virtual directory is created.You can find this option under the details of Internet
Information Services. Go to World Wide Web Service and select Printers vir- tual directory. After clicking Next, IIS will be installed, and you can start using the Web printing functionality
The Print Queue
After your printer is installed and you have assigned the correct permissions, you must manage the jobs that are waiting in the queue to be printed.We just saw how to use the Web interface to manage your printer. Now let’s look at how to do it the old-fashioned way.To access the print queue, double-click the printer icon within the Printers and Faxes window.This will give you the window shown in Figure 13.37.This window shows you the following:
■ Document name
■ Document status
■ Document owner
■ Number of pages
■ Size of document
■ The time that the print job was submitted
■ The port the print job was submitted over
Clicking the Printer drop-down menu allows you to pause all printing and cancel all documents. Clicking the Document drop-down menu allows you to pause and restart selected jobs.You can also view the properties of a particular job. Remember that in order for a user to mange the printer or the print jobs, they must have the correct permissions.
Troubleshooting Printer Problems
Troubleshooting printer problems is one of the many tasks that face network administrators.There are different types of printer troubleshooting. Part of trou- bleshooting is analyzing permissions to see who can access your printers. In this section, you will learn how to configure auditing so that you can see what is taking place. Other troubleshooting involves finding out why a printer is not printing and fixing the problem.When a printer fails, getting it up and running again while preserving as many of the print jobs as possible is the responsibility of the administrator.
Some other common printer problems include:
■ Print jobs go the printer, but they never print. When you look in the queue, you can see the jobs, but you can’t delete them.
This is usually a sign of a stalled spooler.This is very easy to fix. All you have to do is start and stop the spooler service. Go to Start | All Programs | Administrative Tools | Services. Right-click the spooler service and choose Restart.
■ Print jobs go to the printer, but they never print. When you look in the queue, all print jobs are gone.There are few potential reasons for this problem.The two most likely choices are that someone is deleting the jobs out of the print queue before they print, or the user has the wrong default printer selected. Be sure to maintain control of your printers by assigning only the minimum needed permissions. Do Figure 13.37The Print Queue
not inadvertently give all of you users Manage Documents permission, or they will be able to delete all of the jobs from the printer. Only one printer can be listed as the default.Whenever you print from within an application such as Microsoft Word, unless you manually choose other- wise, all print jobs are sent to the default printer for your system. It is very common for users to have the wrong printer selected as the default.
They assume that the printer isn’t working when in actuality, their print jobs are just being sent to a different printer.To resolve this problem, you must redirect the printer, as explained in Exercise 13.5.
One way that administrators can ease the user’s pain from a printer failing is by redirecting the jobs submitted to the failed printer to a printer that is
working.This way, the users don’t have to resend all of their documents to the new printer. Exercise 13.5 walks you through configuring printer redirection.
There are a few limitations to printer redirection:
■ If a job is currently printing, you cannot redirect it to another printer.
■ If the printer holding the print jobs is offline, you cannot redirect the document with the error.
■ If a print job has an error, all following print jobs will be held in the queue until you delete the job with the error.
■ You must redirect jobs to the same type of printer.