Point & Print & Permissions

[Jean Francois Micouleau]

On Thu, 8 Feb 2001, Axel Thimm wrote:

> > With "point & print" printer connections are installed per user, so you need
> > not do anything as "Administrator" (and it won't help).
> > Just login as the user who wants to use the printer, and install the
> > printer.
> 
> Doesn't this only work for users in the "Power Users" group? Our local NT
> admins wouldn't like to grant too much rights to unexperienced Windows users.

The problem with point&print is that users can only read the 
%SystemRoot%\system32\spool\drivers directory.

Only Administrators and powers users can coy drivers to the local
workstations.


So for point&print to work for users, you have 2 choice: 

either you log once as an administrator on the workstation and connected
to all printer to download the drivers to the workstation,

or you change the security permissions on the ...spool\drivers directory
and grant the change and write rights to the users group.



For the completeness of this thread, I should add that before SP4 or SP5
(don't remember exactly), any users had the rights to download drivers. As
it's a potential security risk, Microsoft changed that.

And in NT2000, Microsoft added some new RPC calls to allow the NT sysadmin
to download remotely the drivers on the workstations. If one day I find
the time, I could add those calls in rpcclient.

	J.F.