Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of jpletcher1
jpletcher1Flag for United States of America

asked on

Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote Desktop Services and WYSE Thin Client Printing

We just implemented RDS on Windows Server 2008 R2.  Printer redirection works great for users with computers who connect up.  I'm having difficulty getting an HP printer connected to a WYSE client to show up.  The WYSE terminal sees it fine, and it works with our older Citrix environment, so I was hoping it would work with this new setup too.  Any ideas?  Is there ever a reason/case to install the printers locally on the RDS session servers?  Or put the drivers somewhere?
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of Coralon
Coralon
Flag of United States of America image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Avatar of jpletcher1

ASKER

We have about 50 remote sites that have a cheaper HP 1012, 1022, etc, printer that is connected via USB, so they have to be local printers.  

I'm not sure I understand RDS Printing Redirection.  How does that work?
I'm guessing at this point.. but I'm assuming it works pretty similarly to ICA client printing (the old style).

When the RDS session is established, the server queries the client for available printers, by name and more importantly by driver name.
It looks to see what drivers are available and if they are available, or the user has the rights to install the driver, then the printer is connected.  This is important because the driver names have to match exactly if the user cannot install the driver.  If they can, then it will install the driver and use it.  

On the Wyse terminals using the WyseOS (or whatever they are calling it these days), it can be set to present a specified driver name and it will be used or installed.  

If they are using embedded Windows, then it is treated just like a normal PC.  

And RDS has it's own universal driver that it can use if available.

Coralon
I was told that in Windows 2008 R2 that you can't do the  printer redirecting like you could in the past and that we'd either need to purchase WYSE terminals that have embedded XP or else make all our printers network printers instead of local USB.

I think Windows 2008 still works the old way where you can map printers, but maybe not in R2.  I can't find much info out there on it...
Hmm... that I don't know.. I don't use straight RDS. just using Citrix, so I could easily be wrong with it :-\

I do know that regular RDS has improved capabilities in Win2k8R2, and is not nearly as difficult as it used to be, but I can't speak to the USB capabilities.  I am assuming that they are pretty minimal for direct USB access, while the windows printer redirection is pretty decent.  I'd definitely contact Wyse and talk to one of their field engineers (not sales!) and ask them.

Coralon
The ordinary printer mapping worked fine.  The reason I wasn't able to get it to work was due to the file path to the print map file that I was passing to the wyse terminals.  I was giving the full path to the file when all I needed was the file name.  The WYSE clients assume everything they use will be in the same directory, so the full file path was messing me up.