Been Trying to Print on Network for 3 DAYS

[davidmiko]

Hey There,

A friend of mine and I are setting up a network for a friend of ours who
runs a small business.

We cannot seem to get the printer working over the network in ANY situation.

We are running windows server 2003, with the enabled roles of active
directory, file sharing, DNS Server, and DHCP. Before we had done anything
at all, we attached the printer to the server and shared it with the Printer
Management role, and that worked. It worked very well. We were able to add
each printer on each computer with \\servername\printername and it worked for
printing documents from any computer. Then, after a day or so launched all
the services, launched all the accounts, tweaked everything, and then
attempted to print. Did not work.

Here's what we've done since then. Tried deploying the printer and giving
every user admin rights over it. Tried connecting the printer to a
workstation and sharing it from there. Tried connecting the printer to an
airport extreme to have it accessed through its static IP address. Tried
adding the printer to a wireless print server to give it its own unique IP
address. Tried adding it to the Belkin USB hub so that it had both an IP
address AND a Mac address to add to our DHCP reservation lists, on a variety
of routers. In any scenario, we get an array error messages.

Printing a test page we get "Your Test Page Failed to Print. Would you like
to view the printer troubleshooter for assistance?" We did, with no results.
Printing a page with notepad we get "Invalid Handle"
Printing with command prompt, we get NO error messages, but nothing prints.

Please tell me that someone has a solution that I have not tried, I
desperately need to get this printer working, because I DO NOT charge by the
hour hahahaha.

 

[it4life]

There are some obscure printer models which have some inherent
incompatibities when trying to run under a domain based network as opposed to
a workgroup based printers. These are limited to USB models.

Typically the first thing I would try would be to put it on a print server
to give it an IP address to add it to, bypassing the server role, but the
problem is that the Active Directory security regulations restricts this
solution from even working.

For that reason, even domained computers logged in locally won't be able to
access it in this way, because they've been distributed these security
features.