I have three words for anyone in "printer hell":
third
party
printing
Nothing is perfect, but I've run a 100-user farm for three years, with
international and mobile users, and have not had to spend any time
diagnosing or fighting printer problems.
You don't have to live this madness. Please, friends, I hate to see you
suffer needlessly!
------------------------------
*From:* thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:thin-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] *On
Behalf Of *George Yobst
*Sent:* Friday, February 02, 2007 11:06 AM
*To:* thin@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
*Subject:* [THIN] Re: Printer Hell
Hi Mike,
I'm still going thru printer hell as well, and have tracked one problem
down to a Policy change in the CMC (and I didn't do it), so check that.
For some unknown reason, the printer in the OU group it was assigned
to got changed to the next group down the list (no way I would have done
it).
Printer issues seem to be almost monopilizing my time lately, so good
luck!
-George
On 2/2/07, Mike MacDonald <mike5287@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> 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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George Yobst, Library Technology Analyst phone: 503.723.4890
Library Information Network of Clackamas County fax: 503.794.8238
16239 SE McLoughlin Blvd, Suite 208 web:
http://www.lincc.lib.or.us
Oak Grove, OR 97267-4654 email: george.yobst@xxxxxxxxx
"...it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn
what he thinks he already knows." - Epictetus
