Network Shared printers in a workgroup environment

[Guest]

Recently I had changed my company's print server (WINNT 4.0 server) to a new
hardware & platform (WIN2K server). The first intial problem I encountered
was the separator page did not display the username of the person trying to
print. Instead the sep page showed-up as GUEST. Since we are in a Workgroup
environment. I had to create a local login account for each staff member
(90) on the new print server in order for each user name to appear on the sep
page.

This seemed to work on the first day that the new server was deployed. Users
were able logon to the new print server, print documents and have thier
intials printed on the SEP page. On the following day, users found that they
werew unable to connect to the printers. They would get an error message
stating, "unable to access printer.

Is there a way to fix this issue, where users stay connected to the network
printers? and not have to re-log back onto the new print server?

 

[Bruce Sanderson]

If you have 90 users, I suggest consider implementing a Domain (Active
Directory). This will allow centralized user account management and access
control among other things. Implementing a Domain is a non-trivial task, so
you might need to get some help to do this well. However, once the Domain
is set up, workstation and user administration can be considerably less
work!

In the mean time, add a command file to the Start Menu\Programs\Startup
folder in the User's profile on their workstation that looks like this:

NET USE \\W2KServerName\IPC$ password /USER:W2KServerUserName

Key the text in upper case as is (you can actually key them in lower case)

Substitute:
for W2KServerName, the name of the print server

for password - the current password for the user's account on the print
server - if you put an "*" instead, the user will get prompted for their
password - avoids having passwords in plain text in the command file

for W2KServerUserName - the username of the user's account on the print
server

Then, when the user logs on to their workstation, they will get
authenticated on the W2K print server. This solves the issue that the
network printer connection process has no way to ask the user for
credentials the way connecting to a folder share does.