I spend a lot of time perusing the email messages I receive from you, and I find it helpful to organize the messages by subject in mailbox subfolders. The Printing Questions subfolder is large, which tells me that setting up printers and resolving printing problems is a never-ending responsibility for you. So, to address some of your most frequently asked questions, I offer the following six network printing administration tips.
Tip 1: Unclutter Event Viewer Print Logs
Administrators who periodically check the Event Viewer System logs find informational messages about printing on every computer that acts as a print server. The messages appear in pairs: The first message tells you that a specific user printed a specific document, and the second message, time-stamped a few seconds later, tells you that the document was deleted from the printer. Microsoft sets this audit-type function by default. Unless you charge users a fee to print documents, this information probably isn't useful.
To stop crowding your Event Viewer with these nonessential entries, follow these steps on every computer that acts as a print server. Open the Printers folder (called Printers and Faxes in Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP), and choose File, Server Properties. On the Advanced tab, which Figure 1 shows, clear the Log spooler information events check box.
You might also want to clear the Log spooler warning events check box. Warning events occur whenever anyone with the appropriate permissions changes configuration options for a printer or the print server. Enabling this option makes sense only when you're receiving printer error messages in the System log and want to see whether inappropriate changes could be causing the errors.
Tip 2: Permit Print Operators Group to Add Printers
If you have users who know enough about Windows to install and configure printers, giving them the power to do so makes sense. Most administrators add these users to the Print Operators group, which is a built-in domain group. However, members of the Print Operators group receive an Access Denied error when they attempt to install a printer with third-party drivers. During printer installation, Windows copies the printer's .inf file to the %systemroot%\inf subfolder. Oddly, Windows denies Write permission in that subfolder (which contains printer drivers) to members of the Print Operators group. You need to change the per-missions of the %systemroot%\inf subfolder to include the right to write for the Print Operators group. (Windows-supplied printer drivers are already in the %systemroot%\inf subfolder, so no writing takes place for printers that have Windows drivers and the error message doesn't appear.)
Tip 3: Use Printer Pools to Balance Print Load
You can use printer pools to ensure printing services in mission-critical operations. Pooling is a good way to spread the print load when heavy printing activity forces users to wait a long time for their documents to print.
A printer pool exists when a virtual printer (an icon in the Printers folder that represents a printer driver you've installed) can send print jobs to multiple physical printers. The physical printers must be the same model or have an emulation mode that lets the printer driver control them.
The printers should be located together because users won't know which physical printer received the job. For a two-printer pool, I add a second parallel port to the computer. For more than two printers, I use the USB ports that come with most printers sold today. I've also set up printer pools across two computers; each computer has one or more physical printers that are in the pool. In that case, the port is the Universal Naming Convention (UNC) name \\ComputerName\Shared_PrinterName.
To configure printer pooling, install an instance of the printer driver on the computer you're using as a print server (after you've physically installed the printers). Then, follow these steps:
- In the Printers folder, right-click that printer's icon and select Properties from the shortcut menu.
- Click the Ports tab and select the Enable Printer Pooling check box.
- Select all the additional ports to which the printers in the pool are connected. Click OK.