Sanity check: Print Server upgrade
-
@Breffni-Potter said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Huh? You can do this without any down time.
What do you do when the group polices don't apply correctly to some of the devices? You need to reboot or force a GP update on them.
You can't mess around with people's ability to print and not expect a few of the machines not to have problems. I've rarely seen group policy be 100% effective on all machines.Oddly, printer deployment is the one thing that I have never had issues with when using AD. Out of 200 machines here and ~1000 machines at my last job I've never had a system refuse to map printers from a print server over GP.
-
@Breffni-Potter said:
@Dashrender said:
Sure, he should expect some problems, but I'm guessing the OP will fix those hopefully few issues. So I wouldn't expect there to be any time on that end for the vendor.
The OP asked what his expectations should be for vendor pricing, as he wanted the vendor to do "everything"
So I gave him a range of what it "should be" without knowing the skill or quality of the vendor, he has already said he does not want to touch the printers.
@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't want to do this project myself as I hate printers. So I've asked my vendor to do it.
How long do you think a job like this should take, roughly? The figure in my head is different to my vendors and I was wondering who is being unrealistic
You have me there.
-
@Breffni-Potter said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
Huh? You can do this without any down time.
What do you do when the group polices don't apply correctly to some of the devices? You need to reboot or force a GP update on them.
You can't mess around with people's ability to print and not expect a few of the machines not to have problems. I've rarely seen group policy be 100% effective on all machines.If they don't apply they will still have the old ones. It's rare to have issues with these sort of policies.
-
@thecreativeone91 said:
If they don't apply they will still have the old ones. It's rare to have issues with these sort of policies.
But are you willing to guarantee that the vendor will definitely do this with no disruption or downtime? Ultimately it's the OP who might have to have an awkward conversation with his boss if people can't print for an hour.
It's far better to assume the worst then assume the best.
http://community.spiceworks.com/search?query=Group Policy Printer IssueAnd this is by no means a "rare" issue. Even the most benign of settings can go wrong.
-
@thecreativeone91 said:
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
Cool. But don't I apply the AD group to the OU?
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
Cool. But don't I apply the AD group to the OU?
No, How would you do that? Users, groups and computers can be in an OU. The OU is just a folder really.
-
@Dashrender said:
So before we can give you any real expectations, you need to give us more information. How many printers, how many departments, how many users, how dispersed are they, etc?
I did mention in the OP that there are 15 printers and 50 users. I would say most users access 3 different printers eg a B&W laser, a colour laser, an A3 inket.
Probably three or four of those 15 printers are personal printers, where only one user prints to it.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
So before we can give you any real expectations, you need to give us more information. How many printers, how many departments, how many users, how dispersed are they, etc?
I did mention in the OP that there are 15 printers and 50 users. I would say most users access 3 different printers eg a B&W laser, a colour laser, an A3 inket.
Probably three or four of those 15 printers are personal printers, where only one user prints to it.
Why do you have so many printers for so few users?
-
@Breffni-Potter said:
But are you willing to guarantee that the vendor will definitely do this with no disruption or downtime? Ultimately it's the OP who might have to have an awkward conversation with his boss if people can't print for an hour.
Downtime is ok. We have downtime from time to time under normal operations when printers break, so people are fairly used to it. They normally just print to a different printer and complain that they have to walk a little further to collect the print-outs. I just tell them the exercise is good for them
-
@thecreativeone91 said:
Why do you have so many printers for so few users?
Partly lazy users who don't like to walk further than a few feet.
Then we have (I think)
3 dot matrix OKI for printing out multi-part stationary from our ERP system (yeah, I know)
3 MFP lasers which replaced the photocopiers
1 plotter
1 A3 laser for engineering drawings
1 A3 inkjet for engineering drawings
1 high end print for producing our brochures and technical literature
plus a handful of personal printers because directors insist of having their own printers in their offices. -
@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't want to do this project myself as I hate printers. So I've asked my vendor to do it.
Bring in @thanksajdotcom he's the go to printer guy.
-
@thecreativeone91 said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
Cool. But don't I apply the AD group to the OU?
No, How would you do that? Users, groups and computers can be in an OU. The OU is just a folder really.
I'm probably showing my ignorance here. Can I just create a GPO called "Accounts Printers" and then add the "Accounts" AD security group under security filtering? Or is that a dumbass way of proceeding?
-
@Breffni-Potter said:
I'd say 2 hours at a minimum, 2 hours of "I can't print anymore"
4 hours of engineer time at maximum even with all the snags in the world. 1 hour if everything goes off without a hitch.
Thanks.
Would anyone else like to give me a time for this? I'm looking for some consensus.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
Cool. But don't I apply the AD group to the OU?
No, How would you do that? Users, groups and computers can be in an OU. The OU is just a folder really.
I'm probably showing my ignorance here. Can I just create a GPO called "Accounts Printers" and then add the "Accounts" AD security group under security filtering? Or is that a dumbass way of proceeding?
That's what I do... not sure if it is the right way or not.
-
Another quick question as I really don't know how print servers work. My vendor has expressed concerns about printer compatibility with Server 2012r2. Possibly naively, I had assumed that it was the OS of the client that was the key, not the server? This is because I thought it was the client that installed the printer driver, and the server really just acted as a driver repository, as well as performing queue management etc etc.
If anything, I'd assumed that we would have less issues with 2012r2 than 2003, since it's 64-bit and all our clients are Windows 7. 2012R2 and Windows 7 will be using the same drivers won't they?
If anyone has any links to a good read on how a printer server actually works, or can give me a really basic overview, I'd be really grateful.
I still want to know how long you think this project would take you btw
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
Another quick question as I really don't know how print servers work. My vendor has expressed concerns about printer compatibility with Server 2012r2. Possibly naively, I had assumed that it was the OS of the client that was the key, not the server? This is because I thought it was the client that installed the printer driver, and the server really just acted as a driver repository, as well as performing queue management etc etc.
If anything, I'd assumed that we would have less issues with 2012r2 than 2003, since it's 64-bit and all our clients are Windows 7. 2012R2 and Windows 7 will be using the same drivers won't they?
That seems like a silly distinction... you can deploy both 64-bit and 32-bit drivers with the print server. If the drivers work on Windows 8/8.1 or even Windows 7 they will work on Server 2012r2.
-
Well that's what I thought. But they're saying differently.
-
Well, you can prove it one simple way - install the printer on the 2012R2 server, which as @coliver says, should work assuming those other things.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
@thecreativeone91 said:
If you have your OUs setup by location and department (as the norm) you should just be deploy the printers in GPOs within that OU.
Cool. But don't I apply the AD group to the OU?
No, How would you do that? Users, groups and computers can be in an OU. The OU is just a folder really.
I'm probably showing my ignorance here. Can I just create a GPO called "Accounts Printers" and then add the "Accounts" AD security group under security filtering? Or is that a dumbass way of proceeding?
Looks like how I'd do it as well.
As for how long it should take, I'd guesstimate it would be around 6 hours or less to give you 4+ of troubleshooting. If all goes well, one should be able to create 15 security groups and 1 GPO with 15 printers in under 1 hour, assuming all of the needed info/drivers are already available. Assuming you don't want to pay the consultants to download the drivers, you should do that first.
-
@Carnival-Boy said:
If anything, I'd assumed that we would have less issues with 2012r2 than 2003, since it's 64-bit and all our clients are Windows 7. 2012R2 and Windows 7 will be using the same drivers won't they?
If anyone has any links to a good read on how a printer server actually works, or can give me a really basic overview, I'd be really grateful.
Anyone? Googling over my lunch hour, I'm guessing that it depends on whether you tick the box "Render the print jobs on client computers". If ticked, the Windows 7 client will render the document and send the RAW file to the print server. So the print server just sends the file to the printer - there is no driver issue. But if unticked, the server will render the file using the driver that it has installed. So if there is a different driver on the client and the server, I guess you could have issues?
It seems that the default should always be to render the jobs on the client though, which keeps things simple.
I can't change this setting on my existing 2003 server anyway, because it's not a supported feature of 2003. Yet when I look on the clients, this setting is ticked.
I find it all a bit confusing and this is exactly why I wanted to outsource the job. I really don't want to be learning about print servers during my lunch break. But in the words of Al Pacino:
