Ant. said:
One of my customer is migrating 1300 workstations from
WinNT to WinXP. Bascially he would like to know if it
would be possible to have 2 printing queues per printer;
one under WinNT4 for the NT clients and one under Win2003
for the WinXP clients.
If this is possible, would anyone know how to proceed?
Thanks a lot,
Ant.
Sure... it's actually a good idea to do that to avoid some issues you can
encounter when mixing version 2 and version 3 drivers. See
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windowsserver2003/technologies/fileprint/prtdrive.mspx
I assume you intend to have two print servers during the migration period...
1 WinNT4 and 1 Win2003? Well in that case you can just create print queues
on each that point to the same IP address for the print device. The servers
don't really need to know or care that there is another server with a queue
for the same device. It's up to the print device's network printserver
card/box (i.e. HP JetDirect, whatever) to sort out the incoming requests no
matter where they come from.
*Note... it's also possible to create multiple queues on the same server,
pointing to the same device. The driver can be the same or different, and
the settings can even be the same or different. For example, one could be
configured to duplex by default while the other would not. This is getting
a bit away from your question though. Microsoft documentation refers to a
"printer" as an object on the server... basically what you are calling a
"print queue" and they refer to the actual hardware known as printers as
"print devices."*
