Network print setup with Win2K server

[Graham]

Hi,

I have what should be a simple question about printer setup.

I work for a small but expanding company that has moved from 1 printer
to 8 printers over the past two years.

The network is made up of a Win2K server (Exchange, Active directory
etc) and x Win2K pro and WinXP workstations.

The printers are currently connected to the Win2K server, which shares
them and people use \\servername\printershare to access them from their
machines.

All the printers are IP connected and a couple of them have a print
server between them and the network.

All fine so far ...

The problem I have is that, when people print, any failure/confirmation
messages go to the server and not back to the user who requested the
print in the first place.

I read the response a while back that the popups for messages such as
'out of paper' couldn't be redirected to the user's machine.

My question is more general. I would like the users to be able to see
what is currently in the spooler for any of the printers so they can
decide where and if they want to print at the moment. I would like them
to be able to see the status of their print requests and whether they
are held, how many prints in front of them so that they can cancel their
request if needed.

This all sounds like stuff that I would expect any decent print server
to provide and I assume that Win2K is no exception...

But I can't for the life of me see where to set a "send info back to the
user and not to the server" switch ... I am sure it must be there and
will presumably trigger some of what I describe above..

any information gratefully received.

I assume there are two approaches to printers in this environment.
1) Use Win2K as the server and have all clients use the shares on Win2K
2) Don't use a printer server and have all clients spool to the printer
(or the printer server) directly.

It seems like with 2) the problems would be with having to keep
reconfiguring all machines with updates/changes/settings
Also, with 2), if everyone is spooling to the printer, presumably they
would have no chance of seeing the size of the waiting queue, unless the
printer has a server in front of it.

So, it seems like 1) is the solution I want .. but I really do need to
sort out getting messages back to the users.

Any comments/thought gratefully accepted ...

Cheers

Graham

 

[Gerry]

Your best bet would be to put shares on the printers and
then go out to each machine and install the printer that
the users need to print to. Any feedback messages would
then be sent to the user. Or if your printer has network
capabilities, assign it an ip. HAve the the users install
the printer using the tcp port. Good luck.

 

[Graham]

Thanks for the comments ..

Your best bet would be to put shares on the printers and

Sorry, I don't understand exactly what you mean by put shares on the
printer .. do you mean put a sharing device in front of each printer
(other than the win2k server ?

then go out to each machine and install the printer that
the users need to print to. Any feedback messages would
then be sent to the user. Or if your printer has network
capabilities, assign it an ip. HAve the the users install
the printer using the tcp port. Good luck.

In this situation, I can understand that the messages for the printers
would go back to the user, which is what I want ...

but what would happen when, say, three people print at the same time ..
would there be a spooler on each workstation .. in which case, would
they be aware of the queue of other items waiting to print ?
Or would each workstation spool to the printer independently ..
presumably something would stop the pages coming out interleaved

Cheers

Graham