Installing and Configuring Printers on Windows Servers Part 2

Posted by arlene

Sharing the Printer on the Network

The last dialog box you see enables the printer to be offered as a printer share for network clients. In this dialog box you must select the Shared radio button, and then give the printer a name that will be displayed to users. Note that the Share Name field defaults to the type of printer and the first eight characters to be available to clients that have restrictions on the length of resource names, such as older MS-DOS clients. You can edit this field and use any name that makes sense to your users. It’s usually best to use a name that indicates both the location of the printer and the kind of printer.

This dialog box also can be used to load additional drivers for clients that connect to the printer over the network. For example, if you have Windows 95 clients on your network, you should select Windows 95 from the dialog box. When this tyke of client must send a print job to the printer, Windows NT Server downloads the driver to the client so that the print job is formatted correctly for the printer. If the driver you specify is not already loaded on the system (for another printer, for example), you are prompted for the location of the driver. When you have finished specifying a share name for the printer and have selected any additional printer drivers you want to load, click the Next button.

Another dialog box asks whether you want to print a test page. This step is highly recommended because if the test page doesn’t print, nothing else is going to print. If the test page does not print, review the selections you have made to be sure they are accurate. Or you might have a network problem that needs to be looked into. If this is a TCP/IP-networked printer, for example, you might try pinging the printer to determine whether it’s reachable on the network. If you are using another protocol, try printing from a different computer that is configured similarly and determine whether this succeeds. If not, a network problem (such as a router configuration) might need to be resolved.

Print Server Properties, Printer Properties, and Document Properties for Windows NT 4.0Server

Windows NT 4.0 Server enables you to configure properties for the print server as a whole and configure properties that are specific to each printer you create. You can also configure default properties that are applied to documents printed on the server.

Print Server Properties

To bring up the properties sheet for the print server, choose File, Properties in the Printers folder. There are three tabs on this properties sheet:

• Forms—Usethis tab to define forms that are available to users who use printers on this server.
• Ports—Thistab enables you to add, delete, or reconfigure ports (it’s similar to the dialog boxpresented when you created a printer).

• Advanced—This tab enables you to set up logging and notifications for the print server, and specify the spooling directory.

Forms are used to define certain properties of the output page that will be printed, including the size of the paper and the margins. Windows NT Server comes with several standard forms already defined, including most standard paper sizes and envelopes. If you have a special form that you have created for your business, such as an invoice format, you can define a new form using the Forms tab.

If you plan to set up several printers but want to get some of the work out of the way beforehand, you can use the Ports tab to create the necessary ports. When you actually get around to creating the printers, you can select the appropriate port rather than create it. This also can be useful in an environment in which one administrator is responsible for network functions and another is responsible for printing. The network administrator who is aware of network addresses used by certain devices can create the ports and send a list to the printer administrator, who can then create and manage the printers that use the ports.

The Advanced tab is an important one to remember for troubleshooting purposes in which the more information you have, the better chance you have of solving your problem. You can enable the following notification and logging categories:

• Log Spooler Error Events
• Log Spooler Warning Events
• Log Spooler Information Events
• Beep on Errors of Remote Documents
• Notify When Remote Documents Are Printed

The Log Spooler Error Events option sets a logging severity level for events that will be placed into the System Event Log. You can use the Event Viewer administrative tool to examine the logged events. If users are complaining that their print jobs are not being printed, enable all three of the Log Spooler check boxes and, after they have attempted to print, review the records found in the Event Log.

The information recorded in the Event Log helps you determine why the users‘ jobs are not printing. The Log Spooler Information Events check box also can be used to keep track of the pages printed by individual users.

It can be tedious to use the graphical interface provided by the Event Viewer to review each record. To overcome this obstacle, you can create a comma-delimited file that contains the information found in the file. However, to do this you need the Dump Event Log (DUMPEL.EXE) utility, which can be found in the Windows NT Server 4.0 Resource Kit.

Another useful thing you can do on this tab of the properties sheet is change the spooling directory used by the server. If performance is a problem with the server, you might want to locate the spooling directory on a disk by itself to speed up access. For a low-volume print server, this probably won’t be necessary.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Installing and Configuring Printers on Windows Servers Part 2

• Installing and Configuring a DHCP Server on
• Installing and Configuring Printers on Windows Servers
• Finding a Printer in the Active Directory
• Installing DNS on a Windows Server
• Reservations and Exclusions
• Installing and Configuring Printers on Windows Servers Part 3
• Providing Support for BOOTP Clients
• Why Use Unix or Linux?
• Printing Under NetWare Part 1
• Using the Client Network Utility to Resolve Connection Problems