Posts Tagged ‘printers’

Issues with Printui.dll in login scripts

Wednesday, May 19th, 2010

I’ve spent a bit more time working with printui.dll to install printers, and found some interesting things:

1. Adding a printer to the machine doesn’t seem to automatically make it available to active directory accounts.  It does allow the AddWindowsPrinterConnection command from the Wscript.shell object to set up the printer.

2. It can only be run once on a machine for a given printer without giving an error, making it impractical to put into a login script for users (but possibly useful for a remote command or new machine script).

At the moment, I’m leaving it out of the login scripts and just manually adding the printers for windows 7 boxes.  If group policy managed print management in windows 2008 works out, I’ll switch to using that to set up printers instead.

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Using the Printui.dll to set up printers

Monday, March 1st, 2010

I’m trying out the printui.dll method to set up the printers for active directory managed machines in the lab.  It’s a stopgap measure until we install a newer version of windows server, since both 2003 R2 and 2008 have a print management system that should work with windows 7 clients.  So far, I’ve found that the following command will install a printer on a windows 7 client without having to install the print driver beforehand:

rundll32 printui.dll PrintUIEntry /ga /n\\Corman\Mom2

This command should also install the printer for all users (i.e. by computer instead of by user).  However, it looks like the printer only appears if the user already has a valid network connection to the print server.   I haven’t tried it on a windows xp client yet, so I’m interested to see what it will do in that case.

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Feb 22 to 26th, 2010

Monday, February 22nd, 2010

This week I’ll be working with the Profs at DGP to come up with a relatively easy to use system for publishing papers on the dgp website. I’ve released a flash update for the managed servers and would recommend applying that your to personal computers as well.

  • New scripts for installing printers that is windows 7 compatible
  • Draft of paper upload submission system
  • Windows machine updates
  • Upgrade fax server to debian 5.0.4 and create debian package for hylafax config
  • Continued work on automated install script for non-active directory windows computers

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Custom print settings for Mac OS X clients

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

While I was experimenting with IPP printing last week, I found a link to a great site that explained how to fully customize the printer setup on mac os x clients.  Here is a link to the article. The important thing is knowing that you have to add the “Advanced” Icon to the toolbar in the print options in order to add a printer with an arbitrary string (i.e. that starts with http, or includes username:password in the printer location). Instead of setting up a samba printer, I used it to add the http printer (which is what windows sets up instead of an ipp printer). It looks like it would also be possible to do smb authentication this way, with a string like the following:

smb://username:password@corman/Mom

I haven’t tried this out, but I will be trying this along with other options to see what the best print solution would be. Once I’ve finished I’ll add some instructions to the wiki.

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