asked on

Remove or change shared TCP/IP printer on W2k server

I have a printer shared and listed in Active Directory on my Windows 2000 server. I need to change the printer name and / or share name but would like to have the clients currently connected to the printer automatically update to the new printer info and keep their connection.

My experience in the past is that this kind of change will cause the clients to retain a listing of the printer with its old info and show it as "unavailable" or "unable to connect". Also, some clients will have the new printer automatically added, while others will not. There are no group policy settings that I have set that should be creating these differences.

prashsax

Yes, if you change the share name of the printer, the old connection on client machines will not work.

You can use a logon script to install the new printer on client machine.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Option Explicit
Dim objNetwork, strUNCPrinter
strUNCPrinter = "\\SERVER_NAME\PRINTER_NAME"
Set objNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
objNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection strUNCPrinter

' Here is where we set the default printer to strUNCPrinter
objNetwork.SetDefaultPrinter strUNCPrinter
WScript.Echo "Check the Printers folder for : " & strUNCPrinter

WScript.Quit
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just copy and paste it into a file and name it "printlogon.vbs".
Change SERVER_NAME with the name of server where printer is shared.
Change PRINTER_NAME with the shared printer name.

Then use a group policy to run this script at user logon.

All, users will install the new printer and set to default automatically when they login.

jbeach3

ASKER

What about the old printer? Is there a way to remove it from all clients other than manually visiting each workstation?

My experience is that publishing a printer through AD is an easier way to propogate it to all clients. Is the above code mainly to make the new printer the default printer?

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

prashsax

membership

This solution is only available to members.

To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.

Start Free Trial

jbeach3

ASKER

Your script seems like it will progromatically do what I'm looking to accomplish. I was hoping that there was something within the Active Directory functionality which would automatically purge printers once they had been removed from the AD printqueue list. It would seem that's not possible, though. Thanks for your help...