How come a “printing system” has to be a 300mb download or CD ordered by mail? I’m all for having that as an OPTION, but for servers and for shared printers, all I need is a driver and that can probably still fit on a floppy disk… if my computers and servers still had floppy drives, but that’s another post!

I already posted about 32-bit printing in an increasingly 64-bit world, and my medium-term solution for that was to stand up a 32-bit Windows Server 2008 VM and use that as a print server.

This post is the next step: printer drivers. Specifically migrating printer drivers from one server to another. For the small amount of printers I have to manage (three printers and two plotters in this office) or even the amount of printers (queues) at my last job (about 40) it’s not so difficult to do it manually. I did just that when we moved into a new building at my last job and stood up a VM just for print queues. Pretty straightforward, really: download the latest printer drivers from the manufacturers web site, unpack them to a network location, Add Printer from the printers window/control panel, new local port, new TCP/IP port, punch in the printer’s IP address, have disk, browse, click, select… done. 40 times. A wee bit time consuming. For this migration here I only had the six, so it should be even easier. But what if the newer version of a printer driver doesn’t work properly with your as-configured software?

That’s where I am right now. We have a Kyocera CM3232 photocopier/printer/scanner/fax. It’s a big one with it’s own onboard cost accounting and “proper” network scanning & faxing. It does color and black & white and prints on up to 11x17 paper (although not borderless printing). On the old OLD server, printing CAD drawings from Acrobat Reader plots properly. On the new-old server, it didn’t. There were some weird issues where drawings would not be rotated based on the settings you selected in Acrobat, but if you left Acrobat’s settings on Portrait but clicked Advanced Print Properties and changed it to landscape on the driver settings, it would work. Not very intuitive and sure to be the cause of plenty of helpdesk calls.

We tried a different driver, we tried an old driver from a CD that presumably came with the printer and nothing seemed to work. In the end, I re-pointed everyone’s printers back to the old server and removed the queues from the new-old server… but that old server isn’t going to last much longer and it’s not easy to find parts for an old IBM X-series Pentium III tower server, and having a single Windows 2000 Server in the mix is also holding the rest of the network back.

The new-old server blew up in December. No big deal for printing, but HUGE FUCKING DEAL for everything else. I managed to get it up and running again, Frankenstein-style and convert it to a virtual machine before shutting it down for good and sending the carcass to the recycling center.

That new one is here, and one of it’s roles is hosting a Windows Server 2008 32-bit VM for print queues, so I’m back to trying to make the new server play nice and plot drawings properly… the Windows Server 2008 driver for the copier is doing the same weird things the 2003 driver was doing… If only there was a way to migrate those queues, drivers and ports over to a new server… oh wait! there is! Hallelujah I think I hear a choir of angels singi—wait, what? that only really works for moving from NT4 to 2000? It wasn’t really updated for 2003, 2003 R2 or 2008? The tool has been retired? Oh good grief!

Fortunately there’s a new version built-in to Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2. You access it from Print Management Administrative Tool, as opposed to the Printers control panel applet. From there you can add the old server as a network print server, right-click it and export printers to a file… then right-click your new server and import printers from a file. I’m in the process of doing that right now, and will be testing it with CAD drawings later today. Fingers crossed.