Printing to shared printer without logging in...Possible?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dave Tiffany
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Dave Tiffany

Our network has no domain controller. (Yes there is a good reason, more
bureaucratic than technical.)

I'm trying to set up a machine (W2k workstation) as a print server and
would like to give everyone access to shared printers without logging
in. We maintain our shared files on another Server and I hate to
maintain userids on more than one server.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dave Tiffany
 
Sooo, you have a peer2peer network? Then you must maintain user accounts on
any machine a user wants to access, you have no choice. Well, let me
rephrase that. You have no good choice. I suppose you could open up a
guest account with free reign, but that is very insecure. How many users
are we talking about?
 
Sort of. We have a Win 2000 Server acting as our file server but which
is actually a member server of a much larger domain. Not all of our
users are authenticating to that larger domain, some log into their
machine and have a second, identical (hopefully) userid/password on the
server. I was hoping not to have a third set of userids/passwords on
the print server.

The reason we don't have a domain controller is the bureaucratic part.
We're not allowed to have a domain and trust users of the larger domain.
the only way to grant the users who authenticate to the larger
domain rights to our local server is to be a member.

Clear as mud?

I may just give up and put the printers on the file server.
 
Dave Tiffany said:
Our network has no domain controller. (Yes there is a good reason, more
bureaucratic than technical.)

I'm trying to set up a machine (W2k workstation) as a print server and
would like to give everyone access to shared printers without logging
in. We maintain our shared files on another Server and I hate to
maintain userids on more than one server.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dave Tiffany
Click to expand...

I'm not sure what the problem is. You have a small workgroup. I assume
you already have all user accounts on all the client machines (or
maybe just one user account per machine if each user sticks to their
own machine). Is the issue that you don't want to have to add all the
user accounts onto the new Win2K printer server machine?

Is that really necessary anyway? Couldn't you just set the security on
the printer (that you have shared on the Win2K machine) so that
"Everyone" has the "Print" permission? (so that anyone can print to
the shared printer and the the user accounts don't have to exist on
the printer server). By the way, I'm not sure of the answer to that
question.

By the way, have you encounted the problem (in Win2K and WinXP) of
network printers being a property of the user (part of the profile)
not a property of the machine? How have other people dealt with that
problem?

Thanks,

Bruce.
 
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