Configuring, sharing, and pooling printers
Printing in Windows NT can be deceptively simple if you have only a printer connected to a computer's printer port for your own use. But when you
use NT as a print server, you can do more to provide flexible, optimized print
services than you could with any previous Microsoft operating system. This
month, I demystify printing terminology, tell you how to optimally configure
print options in several different scenarios, and look at some NT printing
features.
Defining Printing
At first glance, you might think that Microsoft has once again redefined
some common terms to match its version of reality. In this case, the new
definitions make sense. A printing device is the physical object that
produces the paper with the printed text or image. A printer is the
combination of a printing device plus some parameters that configure the device
and how you use it. NT distinguishes between the logical printer and the
physical printing device. These definitions will make more sense as I proceed,
but the important point is that the user sees and can connect to printers on the
network, not printing devices. One printing device can have many printer
identities, and one printer can be a whole room full of printing devices. If
this configuration seems strange, think of disk drives: A physical disk can
appear as many logical disks, and a logical disk can, thanks to striping or
volume sets, be several physical disks.
Adding a Printer
You can open the Printers window from the My Computer folder; from Settings,
Control Panel on the Start menu; or from Explorer. Click the Add Printer icon to
create a printer definition. NT 4.0 provides the Add Printer Wizard, which
simplifies the process. You have two options, as Screen 1 shows, and
you need to read both descriptions. The first option, My Computer, states that
All settings will be managed and configured on this computer. In other
words, you are defining a local printer. To set up this configuration, you must
be a member of the Administrators, Print Operators, or Server Operators groups,
or be a Power User on a workstation. The second option is Network printer
server. The accompanying description informs you that this option will Connect
to a printer on another machine. All settings for this printer are managed by a
print server that has been set up by an administrator. With this option, the
printer has been defined and shared, and all you have to do is connect to it.
Let's look first at setting up a local printer, a DeskJet 540. After you
choose the My Computer option, the next dialog box, shown in Screen 2,
lets you select a printer port. For this example, I chose LPT1. Next, you must
select a specific printer. NT asks for the location of the printer driver files
and installs the printer driver on your computer. You can name the printer or
use the default name NT suggests. Then choose whether to share the printer, and
if so, under what name.
Sharing Printers
NT has some neat tricks for sharing printers or connecting to shared
printers. If you select the Shared option from Screen 3, you can
specify which other platforms and operating systems will be connecting to the
share. This step is important because of the way a shared printer handles
printer drivers. Whenever other NT users connect to your computer, if they do
not have the appropriate printer driver locally, NT downloads a copy of the
printer driver from your system. They do not need a copy of the printer driver
installed on their machine.
This approach has several benefits. First, individual users do not have to
install, and possibly update, printer drivers for each printer they might want
to connect to, which saves time and disk space. In most cases, the typical user
does not have the authority to install a local printer driver anyway, as I
mentioned earlier. Second, whenever a printer manufacturer or Microsoft releases
a new print driver, the printer owner or the system administrator loads it on to
the computer that controls the printer. The next time remote users connect, NT
automatically downloads the new print driver.
So, why the list of platforms? Well, suppose your computer is an Intel
Pentium system and a user with a Digital Equipment Alpha computer connects to
your shared DeskJet and copies your print driver. As you might expect, the
driver will not work. The user needs the print driver for the Alpha, not the
driver for your Pentium system. To avoid this problem, select and install the
print drivers for all the flavors of NT that might connect to your shared
printer. When Alpha users connect, their systems find and download the correct
driver automatically. In reality, you might use an Alpha as a powerful print
server with a group of Intel-based clients, but the principle is the same: Load
the print drivers for any potential clients. If a different client comes online
later, you can easily add the new print driver from the printer configuration
menu. If you have Windows 95 clients, load the print driver for Win95, also.
Win95 is not as smart as NT. Win95 downloads the driver when it connects for the
first time, but it stores that driver on the Win95 computer and never updates
the driver. After you load the different drivers, the setup is complete.