Printer Deployment
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OK I ran the Printer Manager Helper and do not see my printer listed here at all. But I do not get a pop up with any errors either.
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Alright… I figured out what you meant. I tried adding it and got an error. I’m assuming my install script did not install the inf properly.
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Was it a bad driver? The ntprint inf is actually a wrapper driver that just points to any installed drivers that say they will work. You could just host the driver on a network share or even have a local copy that you point to. (Printer manager helper will always say its using ntprint as the driver though).
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We use Xerox printers throughout the district and thankfully they all take the same generic driver. And yes, print manager is pointing me to ntprint.inf for the driver file. The installer we use is a gui so I have no idea where the actual driver file is located.
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I found where Xerox installs the inf file… I’ll add that to one of our servers and push that out. Then go from there.
Thanks for making me think!
Cheers,
Joe
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OK. So I can successfully make a script to copy the needed driver directory from my network share to my host machine.
robocopy "\\littledogs\tools$\drivers\printers\FOG\Xerox" "C:\Xerox" /E /ISI save that file as a .cmd file and upload it to the fog server via snapin manager…
After that, I go to my host and deploy the snapin. I get no error messages. But the script does not produce said directories. I can go to the host machine and manually run the script without error.
Any ides?
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I have also tried this in powershell with a different script with no luck. Script runs successfully outside of snapin.
Thanks!
Cheers!
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Your network share needs to have anonymous read access enabled. Also, if you have that network share you can just set the driver field of the printer to the network share location of the inf. If you have 0.11.3 of the client you could also use SnapinPacks to deploy the driver.
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Tell me more about SnapinPacks.
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@Joe-Gill there is an announcement all about it. Look in announcements.
The reason the script runs manually is its run in the users security context. Snapins run in SYSTEM context. Set your share to anonymous read and it should work.
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Thanks!
I set the permissions to Anonymous Log In Read/Execute and that worked.
One strange thing is that I had 4 of my hosts “fall off of the domain controller”. They loose their trust relationship with our server periodically. Wayne, we talked about this. Sometimes it’s because they get removed from the domain. In this case, it was absolutely not the case. The other admin said, that they do this periodically. We’ll have 3 or 4 a month drop off. You re-add them and everything is fine. Is this normal?
Thanks!
Cheers,
Joe
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@Joe-Gill no its not normal.
If two computers have the same name and not being managed by the fog client, this will break client/server trust.
If an image is uploaded while joined to the Domain already - that will cause major major issues and those issues will be inconsistent.
In no scenario above will a host ever say it’s not on the domain in computer properties. It’ll say it’s joined, but nothing except local accounts will work.
If your computer is literally saying it’s in a workgroup and not a domain - I’d sort of guess someone imaged it with either encryption for that host being broken or the fog client nit installed on the image, or simply the computer not configured in fog to join the domain.
Deleting computer objects will of course cause this.
Old computer objects in ADUC with bad names or same names as existing computers can also cause problems. The new client now helps with that by creating a new object with the right name.
So… could be many things. But none of them are FOG’S fault.
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Yeah we had this issue before FOG. When they fall off the AD DC it only allows local accounts to function but still says it’s in AD… Can’t see why it keeps happening but it does periodically. Either way it’s not a FOG issue!
On a FOG printer related note… Do you know of any easy way to determine what driver a printer uses? These Xerox printers have a Universal driver that is installed with a GUI exe file… I can find the directories that have all of the other stuff in them but I can’t get the Printer Manager Helper to be happy with any of them…
Thanks!
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@Joe-Gill not to my knowledge. Otherwise I would have done so in the PrinterManagerHelper. I’ll keep digging around though. I suppose I could extract the hardware ID and link that to the generalized driver windows generates on installation and then parse that for more details.
I built a FOG driver pack generator from scratch awhile ago that when run on a computer extracted all used drivers to an existing pack. I could canabalize that to get the printer driver. Unfortantly window’s driver system is anything but pretty.
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@Joe-Gill can’t say I’ve ever voluntarily used what I call bloat ware from a manufacturer to install drivers for anything. I’ve always used device manager and specified exactly the file to use. Normally drivers are sorted into folders in a download. Normally an EXE has an option to only extract drivers, or as a last resort, after you see it extract drivers, use task manager to kill the exe and then go find the drivers.
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@Joe-Schmitt as shown in other communications I don’t know where this issue is occurring. Currently all info seems to be passed correctly. Including invalid host certificate (bad naming but that’s from the past anyway.). The server, in current trunk is sending the ihc flag unencrypted and not in Json string. I can only surmise there may be something else causing this issue, for example the flag is coming from a node/time when we both were not aware of the ihc issue altogether.
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Well, I pretty much gave up on using FOG for Xerox printers. I know the driver DLL file the printer uses and pretty much everything else from the WIndows Test Page… But I still can’t seem to get it.
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I remoted in and helped. The issue was with the printer configuration. The
Modelfield wasn’t quite right. -
Is the 600 second delay for the host, the amount of time between when the host checks the server for an update?
What is the Windows command prompt command used to force the host to update?
@Joe-Schmitt I was able to get the Print Manager software to install one of the printers using a new network share I setup. So now it’s just testing to see if the host installs it correctly from the server. Thanks again for the help yesterday!
Cheers,
Joe Gill
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@Joe-Gill there is no way to force the client to checkin. As for your checkin time, depending on how many clients you have, 600 seconds may be a tad excessive. v0.10+ of the client generates significantly less traffic than 0.9 did.
