[THIN] Printer Hell
- From: "Mike MacDonald" <mike5287@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 2 Feb 2007 08:49:42 -0500
I know I am not the first one here to be in printer hell, but recently
things have taken a turn for the worse. Something changed that caused
drivers to get loaded on our W2K/PS4 servers from clients. This even though
driver installation was restricted to administrators, only allowed from a
single trusted source and our PS4 policies said that client printers would
only use native drivers if they were available. Long story short is all of
a sudden drivers started installing - we got up to 135 drivers on each of
the 20 servers in the farm. Along with the high number of drivers we started
having frequent spool service/Citrix Print service hangs or crashes which
has resulted in logon delays as printers try to get connected at logon.
Currently I am going through each server and eliminating unneeded drivers. I
was able to go from 135 down to 53 drivers per server. Still too many, but
there are that many different models of network printers here. I also
renamed the ntprint.inf to make sure no additional drivers got installed
without me putting them there. After I get rid of the extra drivers I am
going to go through the remaining drivers on the print server and the Citrix
servers to make sure they are compatible. If they are not I will change the
driver used for the device to one that is compatible.
One last bit of background is that we use a mix of client printers and
network printers that logon scripts connect users to at logon and most users
connect to a published desktop from thin-clients or via the Web Interface.
I guess I am looking for any suggestions on how to get out of printer hell.
I am ready to build new servers running W2K3/PS4 but don't want to move the
same problems forward to the new servers. I also feel I must be doing
something wrong related to the Citrix Print Service because I can restart it
and the spool service then instantly try to stop it and it won't stop - has
to be killed. Is there something else I should be doing or has anyone had
similair issues, and what was done to correct the problems. I am going to go
through cleaning up drivers as mentioned, but if I need to do something else
I am all ears!
Thanks in advance for any suggestions or assistance!
-Mike MacDonald
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