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justin0104Flag for United States of America

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How to setup a printer server to work more efficiently using the Internet Printing option

I have just recently setup a new Microsoft 2008 R2 server on a ESX system. Everything works great with the server it has 4 gigs of ram and only utilizes a small portion of that. I setup this server to be a print server and currently I have the print manger with the internet services role installed. I also have the IIS role installed which allows me to browse my printers via the use of a URL. The problem I'm seeing is when users go to the site I have setup and select the printer they want to install and then actually install the printer using the site, they then see a very slow response from the printer when trying to print from within programs. An example would be if a users would working in Word and needed to print, they then would select print and it takes a good minute to actually pull the listing of available printers. I have tested this on multiple computers with the same result. However, If I just install the same printer locally then It reacts as you would expect, very quickly. I also notice that when the printer is installed using the URL or Internet Printing Protocol, it installs it on a HTTP port on the local machine. Is there a way to use the URL to install a printer on a local port so It doesn't have to communicate with the website for everything? Of if you know of any other options that I have yet to configure would be nice. I also have print spooling turning on and the printers are always available so all settings on the printer side match with what the settings would be if I installed the printer locally on the machine without the use of the URL. So the bottleneck here seems to be the way the printer installs from the URL?
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ggefter

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Yeah I know how to set it up like mentioned in the article and that does work very well but as our company grows it's nice to have a site which shows all printers. It's also nice to allow the users to add printers themselves which takes some of the strain off of our overworked IT department haha. Right now the users are able to install the printer using the internet printing site that was created but why would there be about a minute in delay once they go to try and select a printer to use to print?
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ggefter

no idea what your bandwidth is or what kind of other network traffic your company has but if printers are mapped for users via login script, they will never need to see a "site" of all printers, and as for the admin ... all you have to do is look at the server's printers and faxes to see a full list of them.
Adding printers by login script is easy. How much of a pain is it really to have to wait a minute to map a printer?
Can you give me a sample login script for mapping printers. We currently have a login script setup to map network drives.

It's really not a big deal to have to manually map the drives. The reason I'm trying this is because the last company I worked for we used the same process to install printers. So users would browse to http://printers and could then install a printer if needed. They way it was setup worked perfectly so I know it can be done successfully, I just don't know how to do this. The way it was implemented at my last job, I could be in word and go to print and all printers would respond the way they should. They way I have it now if a printer is installed, the printers won't respond very quickly so I'm definitely missing something. Is there any sort of best practices for setting up internet printing on a server 2008 r2 box.

FYI- Our bandwidth is very minimal so this would not be the cause of the problem. There is some setting in the way the printer server is configured or the way IIS is configured that is causing this problem.
Set oNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")    
oNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\dc2\fs-1128mfp"    
oNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\dc2\cs 400ci"  
oNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\dc2\fs-c5100dn"

'oNetwork.AddWindowsPrinterConnection "\\server\share"
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