NT-Style Printing Notes

This release of AS/U fully supports Windows NT-style printing protocols. A.*.* versions of AS/U only supported "down-level" print protocols that limited support for NT clients. With support for "up-level" printing, AS/U now allows centralized administration of AS/U printers from a Windows NT 4.0 client. Administrators may load all printer drivers for various operating systems (Windows 95, Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0) on the AS/U server which are then downloaded to clients when required.

Note, however, that with uplevel printing enabled, Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 95 clients will NOT be able to connect to a printer UNTIL an administrator has loaded the correct print driver for that printer.

Printers originally shared when AS/U did not have uplevel printing enabled (or shared using previous versions of AS/U) do not have any printer drivers associated with them; thus, administrators must first upload printer drivers for each formerly "down-level" printer before clients may access them as "up-level" printers.

For these reasons, there is an option to disable NT-style printing during installation.

Installation Option to Disable NT-Style Printing

If migrating from a previous release of AS/U, the installation routine will provide an option to disable uplevel printing support. If uplevel printing is disabled, the following uplevel printing features will not be available:

Administration of AS/U printers from Windows NT 4.0 clients
Upload printer drivers from Windows NT 4.0 clients
Automatically down load printer drivers to clients connecting to AS/U printers

With uplevel printing disabled, all clients will still be able to use printers on the AS/U server, but they will appear as downlevel printers.

NT-style printing can be enabled later by setting a registry keyword.

Enabling/Disabling NT-Style Printing

You may enable or disable uplevel printing functionality on an AS/U server at any time by setting the AS/U registry entry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\AdvancedServer\Parameters\DisableUpLevelPrinting

Setting this registry key to 0 enables uplevel printing support; setting it to 1 disables uplevel printing support. The AS/U server must be restarted for the entry change to take effect.

Alternate Procedure to Add a Printer

In addition to the procedure specified in the AS/U manuals, you may also use the "Add Printer" wizard to add printers to an AS/U server:

Select Start, Run..., type in \\asuserver, and then click OK
In the asuserver window, double click Printers, and then double click Add Printer.
Follow steps specified in the wizard

If an existing HP-UX lp spooler destination (lpdest for example) does not appear as an AS/U printer port, execute the following on the AS/U server:

# net device lpdest

Print Job Titles May Vary Depending on Client Interface Used

Titles of print jobs sent to an uplevel printer may be different (usually more descriptive) when sent from the Windows GUI than from MS-DOS prompts. Therefore, banner pages which prominently display the title may look different on this release of AS/U than on previous releases.

Print Job Titles May Have Client Computername Prepended to Them

Titles of print jobs sent to an uplevel printer will now have the client computername prepended to them and enclosed in braces, e.g.

Job Title: [computername] Text of the Job Title

This will help to identify jobs submitted by users who are not in the AS/U accounts database since these jobs will be printed by the HP-UX user lmxguest.

Misc Printer Issues

If a Windows NT 4.0 client has a connection to a down level printer, and that printer is migrated to an uplevel printer (by upgrading AS/U), you must remove that client's connection to the printer and reboot that client before you are able to administer that specific (now) uplevel AS/U printer from that specific client. Alternatively, you can administer that printer from a different Windows NT 4.0 client that does not have an existing down level connection to that printer.
If you are adding a new printer to an AS/U server using Windows NT 4.0 "Add Printer" wizard, the printer name must be 12 characters or less and must not have embedded spaces or invalid characters.
Jobs submitted to AS/U printers from Windows NT clients from a user not in the AS/U accounts database will be printed by the HP-UX user lmxguest. This may result in different banner pages than expected.
If the Windows NT 4.0 interface is used to set AS/U printers' start/stop time, the actual time set on the printers will be 7 hours ahead of that displayed on the Windows NT 4.0 interface.
Print jobs submitted by a Win95 client to an AS/U uplevel printer will have a job name that matches the client computer name throughout the life of the job. Print jobs from WinNT40 clients take on the document name after the job finishes spooling from the client
Print jobs submitted by a Win95 client will be displayed properly and dynamically updated when viewed by the printer manager except for the "amount processed" field, which will always be 0.
Up-level printers on AS/U may be managed from Windows NT 4.x workstations and servers. Windows 95 clients cannot manage up-level printers on AS/U (or Windows NT) servers.
Jobs listed as spooling in AS/U print queues show up on WinNT40 as printing, but will spool and print fine.
AS/U printers will not have their status refreshed automatically when viewed from Windows NT. Press F5 to refresh explicitly.
Print device errors are not indicated by AS/U queues or jobs.
The "take ownership" operation on an AS/U printer does not work
Print queues can not be routed to multiple destinations via the NET command
Processor script printer queues will ignore paused status and print all jobs.
In the NET PRINT /PARMS command, the [EJECT] and [BANNER] options are not supported.