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.

 

[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.

 

[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.