Windows 2000 and Printing: What were they thinking?

[Martin Radford]

> 
> Samba 2.2 has a lovely system for providing UNIX printers to Windows
> machines complete with downloadable printer drivers which works perfectly,
> at least for me.  This system is, however, as far as I can tell,
> commpletely useless for Windows 2000 machines unless all the users on the
> network have administrative access to the workstations they're going to
> use.
<snip>
> domain users.  I thought the problem could be solved by having a default
> login script with stuff like
> 
>     start \\samba-server\printer1
>     start \\samba-server\printer2
>        etc.
> 
> However, whenever I try to do this as an ordinary domain user I get a
> message saying 
> 
>   "You do not have sufficient access to your machine to
>    connect to the selected printer".
> 
> I've tried changing the security options on the printer shares so that
> Everyone, Authenticated Users, Network, etc. have complete management
> access to the printers, but nothing seems to provide domain users with the
> correct permissions to mount printers.  I even tried setting up the
> printers for root and then copying the root profile to Default User, but
> this didn't work, either.

Did you check the security policy of your machine?  Allowing users to
install printer drivers is a security risk.

Go to Start/Settings/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Local Security
Policy.  Under Local Policies/Security Options, check the entry for
"Prevent users from installing printer drivers".  I think the default
setting is "Enabled".  This may be causing your problem.

Martin
-- 
Martin Radford              |   "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ 
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