network printing

[wullie]

hi again lads. i have just reinstalled a good few computers. everything has gone ok, but i tried to install the printers to these computers, which (logged in as admin) worked fine, but when i have signed in as say, guest or another user, it comes up that i havent got any printers installed on the computer. i have allready installed these, i need to know how to instal the printer to the computer rather than to a user name. forgot to say, im using windows NT. cheers for any help lads. wullie.

[Steve R Jones]

Few extra steps, but make the user part of the admin group. Add the printer. Remove the user from the admin group.

[BipolarBill]

You can also make each user a member of the Print Managers or Power Users group. If you forget to remove them ( ), it's no big deal.

[Midknyte]

Since Winnt uses individual profiles, other users won't see the printer unless it is a local device. network printers need to be added on the users account. You could add the printer under the admin account and copy the registry info to the other users. you can also script adding a printer at logon. As bill knows, i've been working on this problem myself. Con2prt.exe should work, but i'm still testing it out. you can get it with the zero administration kit from microsoft.

http://support.microsoft.com/directo...H&SPR=WIN2000&

I don't think permissions are a problem. It depends only if you give the right to add printers or not.

[Midknyte]

I just tested out con2prt. it works pretty well. Here's what I added to my script:

net use g: \\server\general
copy g:\con2prt.exe c:\winnt
con2prt.exe /f
con2prt.exe /cd \\server\printer

Just change "server" to your server name and "printer" to the shared printer name. the /f will clear out all other printers, so you may or may not want to use it. clearing out the printers is good if you only want the user to print from a specific printer. the /cd adds the printer and makes it the default. you can see the commands by doing a con2prt /?

it's really easy to use and best of all, it's free!

Thanks Bill and DVNT1!!

[BipolarBill]

Sure!




What did I do?

[Midknyte]

This solution stems from my windows 2000 scripting thread.

[BipolarBill]

Glad I could help!(?)

Hehe...

[wullie]

well what i was trying 2day was, on the server i was doing a server install of the printer for that specific computer. trouble was that when i got to the stage that asked for the port that i would be using there was no port for the printer. the only ports there were lpt 1, 2 or 3, or com 1, 2, 3. i had a look at the other ones and how they were set up and they all use a port called //servername/printername. know what i mean. and what do u mean by the script things mate? where would i put that msg? cheers for the replies lads. wullie.

[Midknyte]

Oh boy. If you don't know what login scripts are, you might have trouble with this.

You need to add a shared printer on your server. thus your server will be a print server. when you share a printer, the UNC path is \\servername\printername. then you would use either con2prt or net use lptx. If this is too difficult, then maybe you should do it manually.

anyways, printers are assigned by profile, not by computer. You will have to add the printer for each person that logs in. This is just how NT works.