Renaming printer share names

[hocking]

I receintly started at a new company, that is in a six story building, which has about 100 clients running on a mixture of Windows 95, 98, 2000 & XP, the server is a Windows NT 4.0 PDC, and about dozen networked printers. Currently we are not using DHCP, and all the printers names and share names are all over the place, as far as naming conventions go, and the printers themselves are not labeled, which makes it very difficult for me when I try to map a printer for a client, because the clients don't know the printer share names either.

I have been assigned the task of coming up with a common naming convention for the printers, then updating all of our existing printer share names, and then to label all the printers with the printer share name and the ip address. I ran a test, renaming one of the printer share names, that my Windows 2000 PC had mapped, and then when I tried to connect to the printer, I got an errors message stating "Printer not found of server, unable to connect". After I deleted the printer mapping on my PC, and mapped to the new share name, I was back in business.

My questions are, does anyone know of a slick way, or software available that will allow me to rename the printer share names, and then automatically update all PCs mapped to the share name? Also how about some naming convention suggestions that seasoned veterians are using with success? I would like to have the floor name in the share name, but then after that I get a little confused, as to is it necessary to have all the share names the same length for consistancy, such as: 3hpclj4600c, 2hplj6p, 1hpcdj660cxi.

These examples make sense to me because they state the floor, the manufacturer, if it is color, if it is a deskjet, laserjet or color laserjet, and the model number. Please advise, any help would be appreciated. I just received a new Brother labeler that should would out well with the labeling. Thanks. Robert Hocking

 

[globalstrata]

About the naming convention, I would name the printer depending on its location intead on the make and model. The reason for this is that administratively, this is the best since when you open the printer properties, depending on the driver it will tell you what kind of printer it is.

HP has few free administration utility that gives you a bunch of information about a printer including memory, firmware, IP, share name and a bunch of other stuff that you only get by running the test page on each printer.

http://pandi.itrc.hp.com/busprod/CatAtAGlance/0,12497,type=13037^category=,00.html?lsidebarLayId=12

About renaming the share, what I would suggect you do is to setup all the new shares without deleting the old ones. Then write a logon script that adds the new printer share and deletes the old one using the net print command:

NET PRINT \\computername\sharename
[\\computername] job# [/HOLD | /RELEASE | /DELETE]

Gladys I. Rodriguez - MCSE, CCDA, MCP+I
GlobalStrata Solutions Inc.

http://www.globalstrata.com