printer driver issue

[James Sutherland]

On Fri, 28 Apr 2000, Anders C. Thorsen wrote:

> [Charset iso-8859-1 unsupported, filtering to ASCII...]
> > I installed samba 2.6 on a Solaris 7 box which intends to be a print server
> > for all Windows NT workstation clients, but samba only offers  automatical
> > printer driver installation to Windiws 9x platform, not to Window NT
> > workstation platform. NT Workstation user still needs to find what kind of
> > printer it is, which driver they should use, where to find it, and the
> > biggest problem is that, as a general user, they don't have the privilidge
> > to install any driver. Is there any good method to handle this problem?
> 
> Personally, I wrote a pice of software almost a year ago which did
> this for 200 Windows boxes in a novell environment. The problem was
> that each Windows 9x / NT box had a few printers installed (manually
> :) and we were about to move to another location. The solution was
> some registry-hacking.... [I believe there's about 3 places Windows
> stores information about its printers in the registry, in addition
> you'll have to look at the .ini files as well..]

If you try the snapshot utility in the NTW Resource Kit (SYSDIFF, IIRC?)
you'll be able to take a snapshot before and after installing the printer
drivers; you can then get it to dump the differences as an .INF file.
Examining that will show which registry keys, files etc. are needed.

If this is viable for you, you can make NT Setup include these drivers as
part of an unattended installation script. Off-hand, I'm not sure how to
make NT install them automatically; my best guess would be, if anyone has
an NT server handy, to install and share the printer on it, then see what
the snapshot differences are there?


James.