Printers - IP or WSD
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@Kelly said in DHCP Question...:
Another is using a utility or print server so that the end point never needs to know the current IP address of a printer.
Have you found this to work? Even on print servers, I print to IP, and the server print queue is static to that IP.
I haven't used WSD ports on a server yet - have you? -
IP address makes the most sense for us, currently, mostly because we're a mac shop so it's simple to just standardize the ip and push that out.
WSD uses a generic driver a lot of the time as well and that can cause issues with some of our much larger high end printers.
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@Dashrender said in Printers - IP or WSD:
WSD sucks, that is all I am going to say. Causes more problems than it is worth. Always end up doing static IP.
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I've had a ton of issues with W10 using WSD. I switched to IP and everything worked properly. One major issue was printers reporting they were out of paper. Varied by models.
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Now to fork this thread a bit, since CUPS is dropping support for PPD drivers (legacy stuff) basically forcing Apple to use AirPrint, the Windows WSD driver might make sense in the future if hardware manufacturers follow suit.
Since this is the standard, they should but I suspect there will be a lot of trouble in the interim.
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We use mostly brother printers and with those we set it to the node name, which is essentially its DNS address (BRN########). I do still set DHCP reservations for printers just because I like to have things organized, but this would allow for the IP address to change and the printer to continue functioning.
How do I know? We went through an IP address scheme change last year after being purchased and after converting everything, printing resumed as normal without intervention. Would have really sucked if they were all static.
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@zachary715 said in Printers - IP or WSD:
We use mostly brother printers and with those we set it to the node name, which is essentially its DNS address (BRN########). I do still set DHCP reservations for printers just because I like to have things organized, but this would allow for the IP address to change and the printer to continue functioning.
How do I know? We went through an IP address scheme change last year after being purchased and after converting everything, printing resumed as normal without intervention. Would have really sucked if they were all static.
So you use windows print servers?
If so, how do you use the node name? Is that a WDS name? -
No sorry I missed the print server part. I did away with that thing when I first took over. Our printer fleet of about 25 is small enough to manage without it so I'm just going straight to the device.
Again, it's essentially the DNS name which is either BRN for wired or BRW for wireless followed by mac address. It's what populates automatically in the DNS server when connected and then I just create the reservation where I want it. Print management is a breeze these days.
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@zachary715 said in Printers - IP or WSD:
No sorry I missed the print server part. I did away with that thing when I first took over. Our printer fleet of about 25 is small enough to manage without it so I'm just going straight to the device.
Again, it's essentially the DNS name which is either BRN for wired or BRW for wireless followed by mac address. It's what populates automatically in the DNS server when connected and then I just create the reservation where I want it. Print management is a breeze these days.
Allllllrighty then.
something for me to consider.
I wonder if I can deploy non server based printers in GPO to direct printers. The main issue becomes deploying drivers then.
How did you handle that?
Also, without a print server, how do you prevent people from printing color - if you had that concern? I deploy two printers - one with a color driver and with with Black only driver - with that don't have color access, don't get that printer.
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I have a couple of printers, Brother and HP, where I'm using the
Microsoft PCL6 Class Driverthat comes with Windows 10. -
@Dashrender said in Printers - IP or WSD:
@zachary715 said in Printers - IP or WSD:
No sorry I missed the print server part. I did away with that thing when I first took over. Our printer fleet of about 25 is small enough to manage without it so I'm just going straight to the device.
Again, it's essentially the DNS name which is either BRN for wired or BRW for wireless followed by mac address. It's what populates automatically in the DNS server when connected and then I just create the reservation where I want it. Print management is a breeze these days.
Allllllrighty then.
something for me to consider.
I wonder if I can deploy non server based printers in GPO to direct printers. The main issue becomes deploying drivers then.
How did you handle that?
Also, without a print server, how do you prevent people from printing color - if you had that concern? I deploy two printers - one with a color driver and with with Black only driver - with that don't have color access, don't get that printer.
GPO is how we manage our printer deployment for our Windows workstations, for Mac it's all CLI deployment over SSH.
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@DustinB3403 said in Printers - IP or WSD:
GPO is how we manage our printer deployment for our Windows workstations, for Mac it's all CLI deployment over SSH.
I use SaltStack and a powershell script to deploy printers to Windows.
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@zachary715 said in Printers - IP or WSD:
but this would allow for the IP address to change and the printer to continue functioning.
Only if you update DNS. There is always a need for something to be updated, but eysh, this is one of the better ways to handle it.
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@Dashrender said in Printers - IP or WSD:
@zachary715 said in Printers - IP or WSD:
No sorry I missed the print server part. I did away with that thing when I first took over. Our printer fleet of about 25 is small enough to manage without it so I'm just going straight to the device.
Again, it's essentially the DNS name which is either BRN for wired or BRW for wireless followed by mac address. It's what populates automatically in the DNS server when connected and then I just create the reservation where I want it. Print management is a breeze these days.
Allllllrighty then.
something for me to consider.
I wonder if I can deploy non server based printers in GPO to direct printers. The main issue becomes deploying drivers then.
How did you handle that?
Back when I did that, I did have a 'print server' to host the drivers, but the GPO pushed out direct to IP printer installs, just referencing the server to get the drivers.
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Well, I'm actually using a (Windows) print server for a simple reason: Security. All my printers are on a dedicated VLAN without internet access or access to any internal resource. The print server is the only machine with access to the printers.
Why? Because printers are a very common attack vector. Network capable printers and MFP's are often using totally outdated embedded linux operating systems and can easily be hijacked. Same for FAX devices: There's an exploit out there that allows you to gain access to MFPs from serveral vendors by just sending a crafted FAX.
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@Dashrender said in Printers - IP or WSD:
@zachary715 said in Printers - IP or WSD:
No sorry I missed the print server part. I did away with that thing when I first took over. Our printer fleet of about 25 is small enough to manage without it so I'm just going straight to the device.
Again, it's essentially the DNS name which is either BRN for wired or BRW for wireless followed by mac address. It's what populates automatically in the DNS server when connected and then I just create the reservation where I want it. Print management is a breeze these days.
Allllllrighty then.
something for me to consider.
I wonder if I can deploy non server based printers in GPO to direct printers. The main issue becomes deploying drivers then.
How did you handle that?
Also, without a print server, how do you prevent people from printing color - if you had that concern? I deploy two printers - one with a color driver and with with Black only driver - with that don't have color access, don't get that printer.
So I typically just deploy printer drivers whenever I initially setup the computer, or whenever a new printer is purchased. I do this manually and just install the latest driver from Brother. I typically setup at least one or two backup printers in the case they have issues with their primary.
As far as printing color vs black, 90% of our printers are black only, and of the ones that are color, I typically default them to black and white and tell them if they need color that they'll need to specify each time that they want it. Works well enough for us.
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@Dashrender said in Printers - IP or WSD:
@Kelly said in DHCP Question...:
Another is using a utility or print server so that the end point never needs to know the current IP address of a printer.
Have you found this to work? Even on print servers, I print to IP, and the server print queue is static to that IP.
I haven't used WSD ports on a server yet - have you?WSD breaks things. We turn it off on all printers we deploy on a given network.
Windows 10 doesn't listen to our manually setting the default printer post feature update. It then drops the WSD setup in which causes the print driver to break for whatever reason.
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We are a mixed shop, having Mac, Windows and different Linux flavors including some weird ones. IP is the only way for us to get everything working.
But even in a pure Windows environment, I would stick to IP. WSD is crappy. WSD + some HP Devices is a noitmare.
