Windows Server 2003 supports powerful, secure, and flexible print services. By using a Windows Server 2003 computer to manage printers attached locally to the computer or attached to the network, such printers can be made available to applications running locally on the Windows Server 2003 computer or to users on any client platform, including previous versions of Windows, as well as Netware, UNIX, or Apple Macintosh clients. This topic will examine the basic concepts, terminology, and skills related to the setup of printers in Windows Server 2003.
Understanding the Windows Server 2003 Printer Model
Windows Server 2003, and previous versions of Windows, support two types of printers:
■Locally attached printers Printers that are connected to a physical port on a print server, typically a universal serial bus (USB) or parallel port.
■Network-attached printers Printers connected to the network instead of a physical port. A network-attached printer is a node on the network; print servers can address the printer using a network protocol such as Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP).
Each type of printer is represented on the print server as a logical printer. The logical printer defines the characteristics and behavior of the printer. It contains the driver, printer settings, print setting defaults and other properties that control the manner in which a print job is processed and sent to the chosen printer. This virtualization of the printer by a logical printer allows you to exercise extraordinary creativity and flexibility in configuring your print services.
There are two ways to implement printing to network attached printers. One model is created by installing logical printers on all computers, and connecting those logical printers directly to the network-attached printer. In this model, there is no print server; each computer maintains its own settings, print processor, and queue. When users examine the print queue, they see only the jobs they have sent to the printer. There is no way for users to know what jobs have been sent to the printer by other users. In addition, error messages appear only on the computer that is printing the current job. Finally, all print job processing is performed locally on the user’s computer, rather than being offloaded to a print server.
Because of these significant drawbacks, the most typical configuration of printers in an enterprise is a three-part model consisting of the physical printer itself, a logical printer hosted on a print server, and printer clients connecting to the server’s logical printer. This Topic focuses exclusively on such a structure, although the concepts and skills discussed apply to other printer configurations.
Printing with a print server provides the following advantages:
■The logical printer on the print server defines the printer settings and manages printer drivers.
■The logical printer produces a single print queue that appears on all client computers, so users can see where their jobs are in relation to other users’ jobs.
■Error messages, such as out-of-paper or printer-jam messages, are visible on all clients, so all users can know the state of the printer.
■Most applications and most print drivers will offload some, or a significant amount, of the print-job processing to the server, which increases the responsiveness of the client computers. In other words, when users click Print, their jobs are sent quickly to the print server and users can resume their work while the print server processes the jobs.
■ Security, auditing, monitoring, and logging functions are centralized.
Installing a Printer on Windows Server 2003
Printers are managed most commonly through the Printers And Faxes folder, which integrates both printer and fax capabilities. The Add Printer Wizard guides you through the printer setup. The most critical choices you must make are the following:
■Local Or Network Printer This page of the Add Printer Wizard is shown in below Figure . When you set up a printer on a Windows Server 2003 computer, the terms local printer and network printer have slightly different meanings from what you might expect. A local printer is a logical printer that supports a printer attached directly to the server or a stand-alone, network-attached printer. When you direct the Add Printer Wizard to create a local printer by clicking Local Printer Attached To This Computer, the server can share the printer to other clients on the network. A network printer, on the other hand, is a logical printer that that connects to a printer directly attached to another computer or to a printer managed by another print server. The user interface can be misleading, so remember that, in the common print server implementation, the print server will host local printers (whether the printer hardware is attached to the computer or network-attached), and workstations will create network printers connecting to the server’s shared logical printer.
■ Select A Printer Port When you create a local printer on a print server, the Add Printer Wizard asks you to specify the port to which the printer is attached. If the port already exists, whether a local port such as LPT1 or a network port specified by an IP address, select the port from the Use The Following Port drop-down list. When setting up a logical printer for a network attached printer for which a port has not been created, click Create A New Port, select Standard TCP/IP Port and click Next. The Add Standard TCP/IP Printer Port Wizard appears. Clicking Next prompts you for the IP address or DNS name of the printer. After the port has been added, you are returned to the Add Printer Wizard.
■ Install Printer Software If Plug and Play does not detect and install the correct printer automatically, you can select your printer from an extensive list that is categorized by manufacturer. If the printer does not appear on the list, you can click Have Disk and install the printer from drivers supplied by the manufacturer.
■ Printer Name and Share Name Although Windows Server 2003 supports long printer names and share names including spaces and special characters, it is best practice to keep names short and simple. The entire qualified name including the server name (for example, \\Server01\PSCRIPT) should be 32 characters or fewer.
The share name and the printer name appear, and are used in different places throughout the Windows user interface. Although the share name is independent of, and can be different from, the printer name, many enterprises unify the printer name and the share name to reduce confusion.
Configuring Printer Properties
After installing the logical printer, you can configure numerous properties by opening the printer’s Properties dialog box, shown in Below Figure . The General tab allows you to configure the printer name, location, and comments, all of which were initially configured based on your responses to prompts in the Add Printer Wizard.
The Sharing tab shown in Below Figure allows you to specify whether the logical printer is shared, and is therefore available to other clients on the network, and whether the printer is listed in Active Directory, a default setting, for shared printers, that allows users to easily search for and connect to printers.
On the Sharing tab of the Properties dialog box, click Additional Drivers to configure the print server to host drivers for computers running versions of Windows prior to Windows 2000. When you select a previous version of Windows, the server will prompt you for the drivers for the appropriate platform and printer. Those drivers will be available from the printer’s manufacturer, or sometimes on the original CD-ROM of the previous version of Windows.
By loading drivers on the server for all client platforms, you can centralize and facilitate driver distribution. Client computers running Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 download the driver when they first connect to the shared printer. They also verify that they have the current printer driver each time they print and, if they do not, they download the updated driver. For these client computers, you need only update printer drivers on the print server. Client computers running Windows 95 or Windows 98 do not check for updated printer drivers, once the driver is initially downloaded and installed. You must manually install updated printer drivers on these clients.
Other printer properties will be discussed later in this Topic.
Printers that have been set up as logical printers on a print server can be shared to other systems on the network. Those systems will also require logical printers to represent the network printer.
Configuring a print client can be done in several ways, including the Add Printer Wizard, which can be started from the Printers And Faxes folder or from the common Windows Print dialog box in almost all Microsoft applications, including Internet Explorer and Notepad. On the Local or Network Printer page, select A Network Printer Or A Printer Attached To Another Computer. When prompted for the printer name, you can search Active Directory, enter the Universal Naming Convention (UNC) (for example, \\Server\Printersharename) or Uniform Resource Locator (URL) to the printer, or browse for the printer using the Browser service.
One of the more efficient ways to set up print clients is to search Active Directory for the printer. In the Specify A Printer page of the Add Printer Wizard, choose Find A Printer In The Directory and click Next. The Find Printers dialog box appears, as shown in Below Figure, and you can enter search criteria including printer name, location, model, and features. Wildcards can be used in many of the criteria. Click Find Now and a result set is displayed. Select the printer and click OK. The Add Printer Wizard then steps you through remaining configuration options.
A logical printer includes the drivers, settings, and print queue for the printer on the selected port. When you double-click a printer in the Printers And Faxes folder, a window opens that displays the jobs in the printer’s queue. By right-clicking any job, you can pause, resume, cancel, or restart the job. From the Printer menu, you can also pause or cancel all printing, access the printer properties, or set the printer as default or offline. Your ability to perform each of these actions depends, of course, upon the permissions on the printer’s access control list.
As an alternative to using the Add Printer Wizard, if you are using Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP with the default Start menu, perform the following steps to con-figure a print client:
1. Click Start, and then select Search.
2.In the Search Companion pane, click Other Search Options, then Printers, Computers, Or People, and finally A Printer On The Network.
3.The Find Printers dialog box will be displayed, allowing you to search for the printer using various criteria.
4. After entering the desired criteria, click Find Now.
