Network Printing

Printing and Directory Service Overview

Active Directory is a distributed database shared by the domain controllers in a network. Information about printer queues, sites, names, and addresses is kept in Active Directory. This information must be sent by individual print servers, as shown in Figure 4.15. It is important to keep the printer information that is stored in Active Directory up-to-date.

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Figure 4.15 Print Servers and Active Directory

Pertinent characteristics of the relationship between print servers and Active Directory include the following:

Each print server is responsible for publishing its own printers in Active Directory.
The print server does not have an affinity to any specific domain controller — it dynamically finds a domain controller in the appropriate domain.
When a printer is updated on the print server, the changes are automatically propagated through Active Directory.
Printers are published in Active Directory as printQueue objects. The published printQueue object contains a subset of the information stored on the print server for a printer.

By default, the integration of printing with Active Directory is configured to work without administrative intervention. You only need to make changes if the default behavior is not acceptable. The default behavior includes the following:

Any printer shared by a print server is published in Active Directory. This still requires administrative access to the host computer to install and share a printer.
The printQueue object is placed in the print server's Computer object in Active Directory. To learn more about the information that is propagated into the Active Directory printQueue object, see the Platform Software Development Kit (SDK) link on the Web Resources page at http://windows.microsoft.com/windows2000/reskit/webresources.
When any change occurs in the printer's configuration, the Active Directory object is updated. All the configuration information is resent to Active Directory even if not all of it has not changed.
If a print server disappears from the network, its printers are removed from Active Directory.