all in one printers that play well with Terminal Services?

[hookahmasta]

I'm considering deploying Windows TS for our remote employees, but obviously being able to print locally to their printers are of utmost importance. After some basic research, I realized that this is a HUGE pain in the ass, as most printer drivers for crappy USB printers aren't built for such an function. Management wants all our remote employees to use one of those all in one printers that can scan, print, and fax, which narrows the options by quite a bit. Can anyone give me, from pratical experience, which printers works best thru terminal services?

 

[twwabw]

They'll all work- you just need to add the printer drivers to the TS. I have a client that does the same thing- USB all-in-ones at their desks, and they all want them to print through TS on their accounting app. The trick is, the drivers must be resident on the TS for local printing to work at the client. Some of these printers (especially HP) have only a single executable to install the printer- no seperate directory to locate and extract drivers from. But, I've found that if you start the install on a PC, the installation app extracts all the files into a temp directory, that you can copy to another location and then cancel the install. You can then add the drivers once you find them to the TS, through Printers, File>Server properties>Drivers>Add. Once the drivers are added, your local clients will see them on their PCs.

 

[markdmac]

Another way to get the drivers installed is to share the printer on the desktop and add just double click the shared printer on the server. You will be prompted to set it up and that will install the drivers without the software or need to run the CD locally.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

 

[markdmac]

One other note. The All-in-One printers are often DOT4 and will require you to make a registry change on the local machines.

My script does that. Run this on the workstations before they connect to the TS box.

'==========================================================================
'
' NAME: TSPrintFix.vbs
'
' AUTHOR: Mark D. MacLachlan , The Spider's Parlor
' URL: [URL unfurl="true"]http://www.thespidersparlor.com[/URL]
' (c) 2003 All Rights Reserved
' DATE  : 12/22/2003
'
' COMMENT: Fixes printing via terminal services to allow DOT4 printers
'
'==========================================================================
myPrompt = MsgBox("This script will set up your printers for use with Terminal Services",vbOKCancel,"Setup Printers for Terminal Services?")
If myPrompt = 1 Then 
	Set WshShell=WScript.CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
	keypath ="HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default\AddIns\RDPDR\FilterQueueType"
	WshShell.RegWrite keypath, -1, "REG_DWORD"
	If WshShell.RegRead(keypath) = "-1" Then
		MsgBox "Setup was successful",,"Success"
	Else
		MsgBox "Sorry A Problem Was Encountered" & vbCrLf & "Make sure you have permission to write to the registry.",,"Something went wrong"
	End If	
End If
WScript.Quit

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark

 

[hookahmasta]

Thanks for all your advice, as y'all a much better resource than any freakin MS Server 2003 book out there... nothing beats real world experience....

I am planning something not real big, a terminal service for about 10 remote users (I figure max load might be 5 or 6 users). They can VPN in, terminal in the box, then probably use it to run some crystal reports on off our SQL server, do some MS Office work on our network drives, and run our CRM, because our remote version of the CRM kinda sucks. But anyway.....

How exactly does the licensing for Terminal Services for MS 2003 work? Right now, I have 2 Win 2000 servers, and they allow 2 maximum simuteanous users to login using terminal services. I read that Win2003 terminal server is quite different. What kinda of add on license do I need to have 5 simulteanous terminal connections? I read all the MS resources and I'm kinda puzzled. It mentions a need for a seperate license server... do I really need that? Can anyone give me some samples of their terminal server setup, both hardware and software, so that I can have something to reference to? Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you.

 

[markdmac]

Actually the way 2000 and 2003 handle the licensing is not different.

Both support running the server in Admin mode that gives you 2 free remote admin sessions to manage the server. If you want to have users connecting then you simply have to install Terminal Services via the Control Panel, Add/Remove Programs, Windows Components. When installing you will be asked if you wish to run in Application Sharing Mode. Say YES.

The TS license server is installed the exact same way, it is an added component similar to DNS, DHCP etc.

TS Licensing should be installed on a DC for the least amount of setup, however if you only plan to install a single server then you may wish to install the license server directly on the TS box. If you do that then you will need to just follow a simple KB article:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/279561/en-us.

Microsoft has extensive white papers on setting up terminal services. Go to

http://support.microsoft.com

and type setup terminal services in the search box.

I hope you find this post helpful.

Regards,

Mark