Making printer queue available without authentication

[DLN]

We have a lot of maintenance on college lab computers that occurs with
student workers logged into local admin accounts that are not authenticated
to the domain. When they use the add printer wizard to create a network
printer, an authentication dialog box pops up. When they enter the user and
password from a local account on the server or a domain account, the
printer is created. Is there any way to configure the print server to not
require any authentication when trying to setup network printers like this?
We have "everyone" configured to print as well as "anonymous logon". On NT
4, we have tried "guest". None of these attempts has produced the results
that we are looking for. Any suggestions?

The authentication is also causing problems because we are trying to create
scripts to automate printer setup from the local account.

Thanks.

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

I don't know how to configure an NT 4 server so that it won't ask for
credentials when attempting to connect to a printer, however, you can create
a network printer for anyone that logs on at the computer so they don't need
to create their own. See
http://members.shaw.ca/bsanders/NetPrinterAllUsers.htm.

Also, if the user issues the command

net use \\NT4ServerName\IPC$

this will authenticate the user on NT4ServerName using the guest account
(assuming it is Enabled and they have not logged on locally with a username
that is the same as a local username on NT4ServerName) so they won't
actually get the prompt for credentials.

This command can be put into a logon script or in a .cmd file in the All
Users or specific users Startup folder.