free print proxy/relay options?

[blastman]

hi all,

I currently have 2 dc's on my site.

Both have all our 30 odd printers installed (done on one then used print merge) but all of our clients are connected to \\dc1\prtiner_share.

My problem is that if dc1 dies, no-one can print. with over 200 clients in the building, it'll take longer to remap than it would to re install so I'm looking for a free proxy/relay thingy to sit in between them.

ideally, i'd like to point the clients at a \\proxy/relay/load-balancing\printer_share and then have some sort of device/service to detmine which dc to send the print job to. if a dc dies, then the other picks up the slack.

I've been reading into pound which is a linux app, I've also considered internet printing and setting up a web site that simply pings a printer and forwards if successful.

Either way, I'm lost in the options, which id I'm honest, isn't many!

any ideas or thoughts?

and no, I don't have windows 2008 r2 ent. only have std

thanks.

 

[tribz]

Can you not split the number of printers over the 2 DC's, perhaps grouped by department to minimize the loss of printing?

A DC going down during business hours should be a pretty rare event really? Is it going down a lot?

Edit, have a look here. Looks like a bit of work but doable. You could also look into VBS scripting to install printers via a batch file on affected machines.

 

[blastman]

Can you not split the number of printers over the 2 DC's, perhaps grouped by department to minimize the loss of printing?

i have thought about this and failing anything else, it'll be the option i go with.

A DC going down during business hours should be a pretty rare event really? Is it going down a lot?

no. hardly ever. just trying to add some extra levels of backup into our ever growing network.

Edit, have a look here. Looks like a bit of work but doable. You could also look into VBS scripting to install printers via a batch file on affected machines.

I'll have a read when i have some time tomorrow, thanks for the link.

We used to use vbscripts to handle networks drives and printers and this is how i used to do this, but with server 2008 the gpo's got a lot better so i ditched the vbs files completely, and would like to keep it this way.

thanks.

 

[wasc]

Ok, this query is more complex than you might think.

Firstly, to answer your question about a load balancer - I use this product extensively, and it's absolutely excellent -> http://www.zenloadbalancer.com/

It's a totally free load balancer appliance. Supports active/passive so you make two of them and if one fails the other takes over. I've installed it on both vmware and hyper-v so it'll do the job (as long as your printer uses a standard tcp or udp port, you'll get it working on Zen).

Now the caveat. Print jobs use Kerberos tickets, which reference the machine name. As an example, if you have a printer which is shared from \\dc1\hp3210 and you set that exact same printer up on dc2 i.e. \\dc2\hp3210 and then you edit the hosts file on your PC so that \\dc1 actually resolves to the IP of DC2. If you in this scenario sent a print job to \\dc1\hp3210 you would expect the print to come via \\dc2 but it won't. Instead you'll get a print error since \\dc2 sees you connecting and authenticating using a kerberos ticket referencing \\dc1

I beleive you can get round this with some registry changes, but I had this same issue. Migrating from an old print server to a new one - I thought i'd be clever and simply set all the printers up on the new server with the same names, and then in windows DNS point the old computers IP to the new one - didn't work too well though until I manipulated the registry.

 

[blastman]

cool thanks.

I've got zen install on esxi, it's a real nice ans simply layout, which i like!

what reg settings did you change to allow the connection to the windows printers?

thanks.

 

[wasc]

Heh - now you're asking.
When I looked into this, I managed to get network shares working via the old server name but not printers. However I didn't spend long looking into this as I simply remapped the printers - it was more the file shares I had to get people accessing using the old server name.

The article I followed was this one -> http://forums.techarena.in/windows-server-help/1195474.htm

Hopefully you'll be able to get this working. I gave up at the first hurdle