In an ideal world, your network and users would allow you to set up one type of print device in one manner (such as all laser print devices of the same make and model with network interface cards). In the real world, however, things don't
pan out like that. Therefore, the engineers at Microsoft designed Windows Server 2003 to provide you with four ways to attach print devices to your network:
Windows Server 2003 Print server
Networked (as shown in Figure 13-1) Workstation
In the following sections, we show you the four approaches to installing print devices on your network. Three of the four installations are similar; they're just performed on different machines. For example, the steps for installing print devices attached to networks and for installing print devices attached to workstations are very similar. Both machines have print devices connected to their local ports, and they both share print devices on the network.
Attaching print devices to servers
You may find a need to attach a print device directly to your server. We don't recommend that you use this method unless your organization can't afford to spare a machine for you to use as a dedicated print server. Why? Because any time you attach a device to a file server, you run the risk that it may get hosed and crash the server - and we've seen this happen often.
To attach a print device to a Windows Server 2003, you need a print device, a Windows Server 2003 computer, a cable, the Windows Server 2003 installation CD (if you didn't copy it to your server's hard disk), and any print device drivers you want automatically downloaded to the clients.
Connect the print device directly to one of the ports on the server (for example, LPT1) and install the print device on this machine in its Printers and Faxes folder by choosing Start$Printers and Faxes. Then, follow these steps:
Double-click the Add Printer icon, which invokes the Add Printer Setup Wizard. Click Next. 1.
Choose Local Printer, then choose Automatically Detect My Printer, and then click Next.
The New Printer Detection window of the wizard appears and searches for and installs attached Plug-and-Play print devices. If the print device is not Plug and Play, you must follow the rest of the steps in this section.
2.
In the Use the Following Port pull-down list, select the port to which you attached this print device (such as LPT1). Click Next.
A window appears for choosing the manufacturer and model of the print device. 3.
In the Manufacturer area, highlight the print device manufacturer. In the Printers area, highlight the model of the print device. Click Next.
If you don't see your print device listed here, it means you have to provide the Add Printer Wizard with the driver. Click the Have Disk button and point the wizard to the location and path where the driver resides.
4.
On the Name Your Printer screen of the wizard, Setup suggests a name for this printer. Accept this name or type a new name for this printer. Click Next.
5.
On the Printer Sharing screen of the wizard, type a share name for this printer if you want to share it. If you don't want to share it, choose the Do Not Share This Printer option. Click Next.
The share name is the name that your users will see when they print to this printer, so make it meaningful (for example, 2ndFLWestEnv).
6.
On the Location and Comment screen of the wizard, type a location and description for this print device.
Your users can use this information when determining to which printer they want to print. The more information you give here, the less your head will hurt later!
Choose whether you want to print a test page (always a great idea) and then decide whether you want to install drivers for the other client operating systems that will access the printer. Click Next.
Setup copies files from the Windows 2003 installation CD to the Windows Server 2003 computer's hard disk. Also, if you chose to share the printer in Step 6, you need to have the operating system print drivers handy to install (see Step 9) so that Windows Server 2003 can automatically download the drivers to the client.
8.
If you chose to install additional drivers in Step 8, Setup begins copying drivers for this print device and, if need be, pauses to ask you for the location and path of the appropriate printer drivers. Type the path information and click OK.
You can go to the Printer's Properties under the Sharing tab to modify any drivers you've installed. See the section "Managing Windows 2003-Based Printers," later in this chapter, for further information.
9.
If you chose not to print a test page and not to install additional drivers, Setup presents you with a summary page of your choices. Click Finish if your choices were correct. Otherwise, use the Back and Next buttons to correct the information.
10.
If you're familiar with setting up printers on previous versions of Windows, you probably whipped through these steps because the print device setups are similar. At this point, you have set up the following:
One basic logical printer assignment that points to one physical print device on Windows Server 2003: We say basic because you haven't customized any options, such as paper bins, dots per inch, and separator pages, for this print device yet. You probably weren't aware that as you defined this physical print device, you also assigned it a logical printer assignment. Remember that there's a one-to-one correlation between the two each time you install a physical device and define it unless you add more physical devices.
A print queue for this print device: Windows 2003 does this for you when you define the print device. To view the queue, double-click the print device icon. You won't see anything in the queue just yet. Shared access to this print device by everyone on the network: When you define a share name on the network for a print device, Windows 2003, by default, assigns the Everyone group access to this print device. You have to change this default policy if you don't want "everyone" to have access to this print device. If you have Active Directory installed, the print device is published to the Directory.
You can have multiple logical printer assignments pointing to one physical print device. If you want to assign another logical printer assignment that services this physical print device, you repeat the previous steps but assign a new computer and share name. You can assign different properties to this physical print device for each logical printer definition.