Local printers

[WayneRR]

In our Citrix implementation we have turned off the auto-creation of local windows printers. Early experience (before 1.8 and before XP) was that it was possible to blue screen the Citrix server if the right print driver wasn't installed, so we disabled the feature. The user must pre-define their printer, and can only print to a network printer or a few carefully selected / supported local printers.

We also didn't want to encourage local printing since the print traffic travels over the ICA session to the user's workstation (can slow things down over a WAN link).

We're wondering whether people's experience with local printers has improved, what is the 'best practice' in larger scale implementations.

 

[Illuvatar]

With our customers who still have Citrix MF 1.8 on a NT4 TS enviroment, we still face bsod when the wrong printerdrivers are installed. Even with SP3 and NT SP6a. There is not much you can do about it except either remove the printer from the domain, reïnstall more recent drivers or downgrade the driver to a NT TS standard driver. Often it happens with HP drivers but it happens on either network printers or local printers.
With Windows 2000/XP the drivers do not integrate in the kernel anymore. This prohibits that a printercrash causes a blue screen or a spoolerstop.

 

[mjbrown]

The printing has gotten better in MF XP, but I would still avaoid the maintebance headaches of installing print drivers on WinNT4.0 TSE and Citrix.
In MF XP, there is a Uniiversal Print Driver that has improved the compression as well as now not needing a printer driver for each printer that will be printed to. This, however, only supports PCL printers, so if the printer you are trying to print to is not a PCL printer, you will still need to install a driver on the server. There have been advancements, but it's still not 100% there. There are alot of 3rd party print universal print drivers out there, we picked Screwdrivers by tricerat software. If you do a search on tricerst or Screwdriver in the forums, i posted a very lenghty comparison of all the vendors we looked at as well as pros and cons of each. Mike Brown CCA