Login Scripts - Working with Printers

If you have networked printers, then you probably have them shared from one of your servers. You can also use a login script to connect your users to these. This makes managing printers across a network very easy as users will be connected to the printers each time they login - even if they haven't used that machine before.

Connecting to Printers

There are two ways of connecting to printers.

DOS Command Utility

To make the connection to the printers via a login script requires a small resource kit utility to "con2prt.exe". This can also be found in the NT 4.0 Zero Administration Kit which you can download from here.
You don't have to use the rest of the ZAK to get this utility and this utility works on Windows 2000 and higher as well as NT 4.0.

To use, simply enter the command along with the switch /c to indicate that you actually want to connect to it along with the path to the printer.
For example to connect to a printer shared as hp-printer on server1 you would enter:

con2prt /c \\server1\hp-printer

If you wanted this printer to be the default printer, then you would change the switch to /cd instead:

con2prt /cd \\server1\hp-printer

If you have multiple printers you should play around with the order they appear in the script so that the most common used is at the end.

Using the Built in Mechanism

If you don't want to use another file to make the connection, you can also use the built in mechanism. The drawback with this method is that it only works on Windows 2000 or higher. To connect to the printer using the names above would mean the following command:

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /n \\server1\hp-printer

Disconnecting Printers

You can also use con2prt to disconnect network printers, although the command deletes all network connected printers. This is done with the command:

con2prt /f

If you are using the script to connect network printers, you might want to put this command at the top, so that the user account is reconnected to the printer each time. Any changes made to the central printer will then be passed across to the client machines at the next login.

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Last Page Update:
30/04/2006

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