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
>
