Hi guys i have an issue with a 2008 TS deployment and redirected printers created on the TS.
We are using the easy print service for all printers except Epson thermal receipt printers (tm-t88iv). There is a 5 second delay before the print job starts to spool on the client side printer. This is too slow for a POS environment when you have a queue of customers. So we have installed the Epson driver on the 2008 server, as we had done in previous 2003 deployments.
So I suppose getting the easy print service to work faster would be a preferred solution. But I think that is unlikely....
The issue I have with the server side redirected printers (using the actual Epson driver) is that the user cannot change their own printer settings in the RDP session. The default behaviour of this Epson driver is to enable Bidirectional support. There is a check box under the 'Ports' tab of the printer properties where this can be turned off. In TS2003 we used prnadmin.dll or setprinter.exe to change the setting after the printer was created via a script. But with 2008 all such printer settings appear to be greyed out, even if the user is an administrator on the server.
So my question is do we know of a way to allow users the ability to change the settings of their own recreated printers?
Hello Stuart,
Were you able to figure out the redirected printer permission issue? If so, would you mind sharing your solution here or providing a link?
Thanks,Rob
You've got a couple of things going on here. Spooling slow seems to be the main issue, changing settings secondary.
Look into your Group Policies for the settings part. As far as the slowness, I ran into a similar problem but much worse. This caused me to research TS EasyPrint and the new 2k8 spooler subsystem. http://trycatch.be/blogs/roggenk/archive/2007/10/24/windows-server-terminal-services-2008-easy-print-how-does-it-work.aspx
EasyPrint has not changed the laws of physics. It has essentially eliminated the need for the various (and sometimes unmanageable) printer drivers to be installed on the server - which we all know can cause lots of headaches, spooler crashes etc. EasyPrint basically, turns the print job right around to be processed by the client. This puts more burden on your available bandwidth.
My situation was so bad that the client computer display went flashing paper-white and job took almost an hour to start printing! During that time, the client session was unusable. Our solution was to install Net2Printer Server on the Server and Net2Printer client on the clients & make sure the client computers had the EasyPrint requirements (XP SP3[incl RDP 6.1], .NET 3.5). This helped a lot, but we still experience spooler crashes from time to time and jobs still take many minutes to get to their destination redirected printer (over WAN).
I would be curious to learn more about your environment. Sounds unusual for POS.
Samuel A. RodriguezSr. Systems Administrator
Our solution was to disable Easy Print and the slowness went away instantly. We had to manually install the print drivers for each printer we want to use but the speed issue was no longer an issue.