I have two machines (A & B), machine A has to be able print to a local printer. The issue is that the problem it can't have any printers connected to it (network or local) - so what I want to do is redirect the printing to machine B which does have a printer.
In my mind that means that the printer on machine A will be a software printer (like those Adobe PDF ones) and it sends the request to machine B.
Is there such software like this or another way to do this?
Update:
- It is on a network and can browse network shares, however the users that will make use of it have no physical access to it only via remote desktop like sharing. They need to click print on it and it must print on their local printer.
- It will be printing from a limited number of apps, although I have no control of that.
- It is a Windows OS on both machines.
Update 2:
There are two reasons why I am looking for a generic solution for this problem:
Short Answer: Trying to get the users to think as little as possible.
Long Answer: The users are mobile, so the list of printers available can change and is not the same for each user. On their machines (machine B) they are aware enough to choose the correct one. If they had lots of printers setup on machine A, as they move around and connect to it they may get confused.Short Answer: The costs of manual setup are prohibitive.
Long Answer: As the users move around and can connect remotely (from some of the furtherest least connected parts of the country which is South Africa) going to each user and setting it up to reflect their the correct printers and maintaining it when printers are added/removed is very high. Ideally a software solution that we can distribute should lower costs.
IF I am not mistaken, when connecting with RDC you can select to have your local printers temporarily available to the host machine. They will appear under 'printers and faxes' on the host machine if you have it configured correctly, but only temporarily. When you terminate the RDC connection the local printers go away.
This is hardly an ideal solution, but....
We have a server that emails out hundreds of log-files nightly. What if you had your documents emailed out automatically (we use BLAT)? You could have an Outlook rule that would print documents or attachments from certain senders.
If these are Windows machines: On Machine B, Share the printer (In Printers, right click on this printer and select Sharing. Give it a name you can remember)
On Machine A: - from a command line: net use \Machine B\printer lpt1: substitute the hostname of Machine B and the name you gave the printer above. - Install the drivers for the Printer. When the driver asks about the connection, choose LTP1:
You may have to run the net use command whenever you reboot the machine, so you may want to put it in a batch file, and put it in the startup folder.
Your question still confuses me. Why must the printer on A be a local printer? Why can't you just share the printer on machine B, and connect to that printer from A?
One way to make a network printer "look" like a local printer is to add the printer by choosing the "add local printer" in the wizard. Choose "create a new port" and type in the UNC path of the network printer.
you can get pretty creative using PDFCreator (from sourceforge,pdfforge.org) Its output can be scripted in many ways, so perhaps you have it deposit the file it creates in a shared directory on machine B, which the user then grabs and prints.
Further, you could monitor the folder on machine b with software like Logmon (http://www.freeware-guide.com/month/072002.html) and have it set to auto-print whatever gets deposited there, making the process seamless: the user prints from machine a and it magically appears on machine b's printer.
The users on machine a would somehow have to be trained to choose the proper "machine b" during the PDFCreator save process.
This isn't fleshed out, but I think you can get what you're after using this approach.
I think I have this right, but let me know:
Machine A can not have any networked printers mapped to it. However, you will use a local "software" printer that will send the request to Machine B, which will choose a printer and then print.
If the "software" printer on Machine A is still contacting Machine B via the network and sending the print document - why is a networked-mapped printer not allowed?
You can use Machine B as a printer server and map the appropriate printer to Machine A many different ways - GPO w/the new CSEs, startup script, logon script, etc.
However if Machine B needs to determine an appropriate printer AT PRINT TIME, then why not setup a printer (which on a printer server is a virtual device) that is mapped to many physical printers. You can set priority levels based on user groups or other criteria to determine which printer is printed to.