Tuesday 13 January 2009

SBS 2008 Terminal Services and HP Printer Drivers

When configuring a Terminal Services Remote Desktop environment for users to connect to, keep in mind that SBS 2008 has the 64bit driver installed by default.

When deploying Terminal Services, one needs to make sure to install the Print Services Role, and then load up both the x64 and x86 HP Universal Print Driver on the SBS 2008 box.

If the user needs to take advantage of a particular printer feature on an MFP series, then make sure to verify on the HP Support site that there are no specific Windows Server 2008 x86 and x64 drivers available for that printer.

As a precaution, it is a good idea to verify if there are any specific printer drivers, both x86 and x64, with HP's site and load them into the Print Management Console anyway.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

*All Mac on SBS posts are posted on our in-house iMac via the Safari Web browser.

5 comments:

stryqx said...

There's a gotcha with the UPD that goes like this:

If you have your system locale set to English US, but have user accounts using a different locale that defaults to A4 paper size, the UPD will always default to Letter, no matter how many times you change it.

This problem isn't specific to the UPD - other HP drivers also do this. I've also seen variations on this, generally involving a 64-bit OS.

Easy Print overcomes this but does require .NET Framework 3.0 SP1 on the client PC.

Really need to spend a weekend debugging this problem with several virtual machines and ProcMon.

Richard Blanco Jr. said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Richard Blanco Jr. said...

So has this method of using the HP Universal Print Drivers in SBS2008 proven reliable? I had heard horror stories of the Universal Drivers a few years back. I am completeing a migration from SBS2003 to SBS2008 and will be migrating over printers and print queues. Not sure if it is worth it to use this method or go with specific drivers for the printers. I have about 9 network printers.

Also, any eay scripted way to remove the current print queues on the XP workstations pointing to the old server and install the new queues from the SBS2008 box once 32bit drivers are there?

Philip Elder Cluster MVP said...

Richard,

Deploying the printers via GP as indicated in our checklist will deploy to XP Pro. Note that you need to use the XP specific additions to the GP setup.

We always try and use the printer specific PCL5 driver for both x86 and x64 OSs.

Philip

Supermig said...

I'm having issues with high latency printing using Universal Print Driver using Terminal Server 2008 when users are in a different location than the server. The same does not exist if using the driver made for the unit.