I searched around on the internet this morning and I couldn’t find an example of exactly what I wanted to do, but I DID figure it out, so I thought I’d post it  here in the hopes that it would be useful to others.

Here’s the situation:

• You have a new printer on your network.
• You’ve set up a shared printer queue on your Windows-based server, and it’s printing just fine.
• You can connect to the shared queue from other computers, and it works alright.
• You now want to deploy the printer to all the other Windows machines on your network, but it’s a pain in the ass to walk around to every single machine and set them up by hand.

Solution — remotely deploy the printer to your clients by means of your login script.

And here’s the magic formula:

rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /in /b “{Printer Name}” /n\\{server}\{shared printer name}

Put that line into your login script, replace {Printer Name} with the name you’d like the printer to have on the client machines, and replace \\{server}\{shared printer name} with the correct UNC path to the printer queue on your server, and BAM, you’re done!

Now, the next time your users log in, they’ll get the new network printer automatically set up on their machines, all ready to go.

Your mileage may vary, of course, and this solution won’t work for Mac client machines.  Those you still have to touch.

Was this tip helpful?  Leave a comment and let me know!

Another day, another phone cam video.

This one was shot on the Fourth of July on the shore of Lake Michigan.  You could see fireworks stretching all the way from downtown Chicago to Evanston.  What’s even better is that the beach was just full of people, all shooting off their own arsenals before, during, and after the “official” Chicago shows.

Lots of fun.  I’m glad that Chicago decided to split up the city’s show into three different ones that ran the length of the coast.  It spread people out, and made it easy to get a great view.

This comes my way via Anna Tarkov. First of all, the content is excellent; a look at what motivates each of us to do our best work, and surprisingly, why money is usually not the best motivator. But also, the whiteboard cartooning animation is just awesome. Mad props to the person that put this together.