[THIN] Re: Citrix Printing

  • From: "Landin, Mark" <Mark.Landin@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:58:00 -0500

Have you considered a third-party printing application at all?  Yes, I
know they aren't free, but looking at your description, I would hazard a
guess what you've spent in wages and such while fighting, living with,
and mitigating this problem would make software look like a bargain.

________________________________

From: thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Adam Granatela
Sent: Thursday, October 26, 2006 11:29 AM
To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [THIN] Re: Citrix Printing


That might have been me.  We ran into a lot of problems where the
spooler/Citrix Print Mangler would hang, and stop auto-creating
printers.  I called, Citrix, they told me to call Microsoft.  I called
Microsoft, sent them dump files, they said they couldn't find anything,
and to call Citrix.  Finally someone at Citrix told me that they
wouldn't even look at the issue if we had any non-Microsoft drivers
installed on our servers.  Even if the vendor drivers were "certified"
to work with terminal services, Citrix wouldn't help us if the drivers
were on the systems. 
 
We had 8 non-MS drivers out there.  Most were Canon and Xerox.  After
removing them from one server in the farm, the problems stopped on that
server, but continued on the rest.
 
So the plan that was formed:  install native drivers if present,
otherwise use the UPD.  Do not under any circumstance use a vendor
driver.  If we have to tell our various breweries that one or more of
their printers just won't work, that's the stance we're going to take. 
 
Further on this, I did some research on the HP universal driver.  With
the new ability to map something like "HP LaserJet*" to a single driver,
the plan is to shorten our list of HP drivers down to just using this HP
universal driver.  
 
There are still things to watch out for with Citrix's UPD.  Some
printers just don't work with it.  Others corrupt printouts, others
actually will hang the application when trying to print.  There's a
known issue where print-outs come out mirrored and backwards.  The 9.2
client fixes some of this, but not all of it, and I've heard there's
another hotfix to fix the hotfix that was in 9.2.
 
I'm right in the middle of this project to shore up the printing
environment.  This all started with a memory leak in the Citrix Print
Mangler that we still haven't been able to patch, due to about 47
different hotfixes coming out for the same issue, and all the new
problems each hotfix introduces.  All that said, when I'm finished, our
policy will read something like this: 
 
- use MS native drivers
- use Citrix UPD
- All HP LaserJet drivers map to the HP universal driver
- any driver that doesn't work with the UPD we try to find a mapping
for, either to a MS native driver or the HP universal driver
- if a printer doesn't work with any of the above, management will deem
it unsupported
 
Good luck, it's certainly an adventure!
 
Adam

 
On 10/25/06, Matthew McComas <mmccomas@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: 

        A few days ago in this board I saw someone mention they were
using the Citrix UPD, HP's UPD and some other combination of drivers and
that they thought that would be good for their CPS4 farm....can anyone
repeat what they said?  I'm implementing a new farm at the moment and
could use some advice.  I want to stay away from loading many drivers on
the servers for stability reasons, and would really like to use the UPD
driver only, however, I'm sure things will come up which force me to go
away from the bare essentials. 

         

        Also, anyone out there with experience getting Lanier printers
to work in Citrix?  This is what we have at a lot of our remote sites. 

         

        Thank you,

        M


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