How To: Set Only Default Printer

[BridgeRE]

Terminal Server 2003. When users log on, they have all of their printers to choose from. What can I do, or set, to have ONLY their default printer available? In their profile, under the Environment tab, we have a home grown app that starts and the check box is checked to "Default to Main Client Printer". I have a GPO for Terminal Users that gets applied and under User Configuration for Terminal Server, I have a policy set to Enable for "Redirect only the default client printer". But yet users can see ALL of thier printers installed on their local machine. Am I missing a setting? Why is this not working as it is set up?

Thanks.

 

[Dublin73]

and have you enabled loopback processing of group policy? See link...

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/231287/

Also, on the RDP listener (from memory this can be accessed on the server through the Start Menu under Terminal Services Configuration) you can disable the mapping of client side printers, as well as drives and COM ports etc..

This way ONLY printers in the users' login scripts will be mapped when they log in to the Terminal Server.

Within each user's account properties in Active Directory, you can specify a separate login script for the user, for when they log into a terminal server. This can be messy though if there are a lot of users.

Alternatively, you could set one VBscript as the logon script for all of your Terminal Server users (specified using your GPO) and within this script, assign printers based on Windows group membership. To do this, you'd need to create a Windows global group for each printer.

Start with the loopback processing first and see how it goes from there

 

[BridgeRE]

Loop back processing is not needed, as my GPO is set at the user level OU. Maybe I did not explain properly, but as far as a script, I have no physical printers setup/connected to the Terminal Server, I have drivers loaded, so the clients printers will redirect, so they can print to them, only they are ALL redirecting instead of just the default, as I specified in my first post.

 

[Dublin73]

....right you are, loopback processing isn't needed in your case. I read your post quickly. It's my experience that GPOs work much better in a terminal server environment when they're applied to an OU containing the terminal servers (then for the user settings you use loopback etc.)

I presume you've gone through the basics, ran gpresult, looked in the Terminal Server event logs etc.?

As a test, it might be an idea to move a Terminal Server into its own OU, apply your GPO there, with user loopback and see what happens?

 

[Dublin73]

...and to add, the default behavior of a Terminal Server is this.. when a user logs in to a Terminal Server session, admin or not, Windows will load up the drivers for the user's client side printers if it contains a copy of the driver.

In other words, if you have only installed an HP 8100 driver on your Terminal Server, and an end user logs in with an HP 4100 printer, which the user has mapped to their PC over the network, or even if it's attached locally to their PC, the Terminal Server will load up the HP 4100 driver for them.

You can try to prevent this by using the GPO. I think it's in the Computer settings of the GPO somewhere. It's called prevent non-admins from loading device drivers or something like that

 

[BridgeRE]

I've tested for a week straight, and tried to get much help and for what ever reason, I can not get a GPO to work at all when setting at the Computer OU level, and applying the "Loopback". If I find this setting, "prevent non-admins from loading device drivers" won't this keep from any of their printers not being redirected?

 

[BridgeRE]

Any other help with this? I'm still looking for a way to have only the clients default printer redirected in their terminal session. My gpo is set at the user OU level and policies work as specified, except for the defualt printer. This does work in 2008 with the TS East Print, but not 2003 R2.

 

[BridgeRE]

Well I found the reg key that needs to be set on the client end.

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Terminal Server Client\Default\AddIns\RDPDR]
"RedirectDefaultPrinterOnly"=dword:1