Instructor: In this lesson,
we're going to talk about sharing print devices.
Now, there are really two main ways
that you can share a printer over a network.
The first is from a dedicated print server,
and the second is from a printer share
coming from an individual user's workstation.
Now, a print server is either a software application
or a hardware device that manages print requests
and makes printer queue status information
available to all the end users and clients on the network.
Print servers are usually used in large organizations,
although recently,
they become more and more common
inside a small office or home office environment.
In the old days,
you had to have a centralized print server
that allowed all of the printers to be installed through it.
If you had a network printer,
those would be managed and configured
from that centralized print server,
usually a Windows domain controller or Linux server.
Now, print servers are really useful
when you have a large network
and lots of printers to manage.
For example, in my last position as an IT director,
we had 15,000 end users, we had hundreds of printers,
and they were located across six countries,
and I had to manage them all from one central location.
To be able to do that with my team,
we had a dedicated print server.
In fact, we had three dedicated print servers
working in tandem to be able to provide service
to all of those end users.
So if one of the end users
sitting in one of my offices in Spain
wanted to print something,
they would actually send the print command
from their computer.
That Windows machine would then connect to my print server.
My print server would take that job, manage it,
find an available printer closest to that user,
and then print out that document,
so the user could pick it up.
Now, this sounds kind of complicated,
but there's a really good reason we do this.
It allows us to manage these print devices at scale,
because these printers we were dealing with
could be 1,000, 2,000, or $5,000,
and so it wasn't just a single printer on a user's desk.
Instead, this was a printer
that was being used by 100 or 150 people in that office
for that entire floor of the office building,
and we had several of these machines
throughout that office building
and throughout several buildings across that country
and across multiple countries
as part of this enterprise network.
And to be able to manage all of that as an administrator,
you need to be able to have a centralized print server.
This centralized print server allows you
to control the devices, configure the devices,
and troubleshoot the devices remotely
from anywhere on your network,
and that's really the big benefit of having a print server.
Now, I did mention that print servers
are also becoming more common
on small office and home office networks,
and the reason for this is that a lot of printers now
have an embedded print server inside of themselves.
So if you connect one of these printers to your network,
it actually will get an IP address,
and it will be running its own print server
on that IP address.
Now, all of your clients
are going to connect directly to that printer.
They'll be able to send their print jobs to it.
it will take those, it will prioritize those,
it will configure them as needed,
and then it will be able to print those jobs out
for all of your end users.
Now, this works really well,
if you're in a small office/home office environment
up to about 50 users.
Beyond that, you're much better off
having a dedicated print server
on something like a Windows server or a Linux server
that you can manage multiple printers at the same time
because these embedded print servers inside of the printers
only support one printer.
They don't work in a network across multiple printers.
So keep that in mind,
because depending on
what kind of an organization you work for,
you may be using one of these embedded
or integrated print servers inside of the printer,
or you may be using
a dedicated Windows or Linux based print server
that's going to be handling printers across the entire network
for your organization.
If you're working on
one of these Windows based print servers,
you're going to be using what's known as
the print management Microsoft Management Console,
or MMC snap-in,
that will allow you to share printers on the network
and centralize that print server
and network printer management tasks
from that centralized Windows server.
This will help you to monitor the print queues,
receive notifications when the print queue
stops processing jobs, and troubleshoot issues that arise.
As I said,
by having a single print server
that manages all of your network printers,
this will reduce your administrative overhead
for your system administrators,
and this can actually bring down the expense overall
to support these devices,
even though there's this larger upfront expense
of building out this print server.
Now, if you're in a really small office environment
or even in your home,
and you have a single printer
that you want to share with other people,
and it doesn't have an embedded print server,
what can you do?
Well, there's two options.
One is you can buy
an inexpensive dedicated embedded device print server.
These are a small device,
that will plug into your wired or wireless network,
and then on the other end of it,
it will connect to your printer.
This will turn any printer into a network printer,
and allow everyone in your home to use it.
Now, if you want to save $50 or so
and not have to get one of these dedicated devices,
you can instead share your printer through your computer.
This is known as creating a printer share.
Now, a printer share allows you to connect a printer,
using either Bluetooth or USB, directly to your workstation,
and then your workstation will be able to share it out
to everybody else.
So if I hooked up my printer directly to my desktop
and my child's on their laptop
and needs to print something for school,
they're actually going to be printing
from their computer to my desktop
and my desktop to my printer.
They're going to print to a printer share that I created,
and that printer share is a logical extension of my desktop.
So when they sent that print command,
it's going to go from their laptop
over the network to my computer,
and then my computer is going to take that
and send it over the USB connection to my printer
that's hooked up to my computer.
Now the good thing about this is,
there's no additional cost to creating a printer share,
but there is one big downside and that is,
you must leave that workstation
that's connected to the printer up and running at all times.
So if I shut down my computer at the end of the work day
and somebody else tries to print
and I'm the one who has that printer
connected to my workstation,
they're not going to find that printer anymore
because my workstation has been shut down.
So anytime you're going to have a printer share,
it should be on a device that is going to be up and running
24 hours a day, seven days a week.
To be able to create this printer share,
simply go into the sharing tab under printer
and give the users who you want
access to that shared printer,
by creating a name to display on the network.
For example, I might create one called Jason Shared Printer.
Now, if they go into their system
and they go to add a printer on the network,
they're going to see one that is an option
called Jason Shared Printer,
and they'll be able to connect to it,
if they have the right username and password
and be able to print things to it.
Regardless of whether the printer is being shared
through a print server or as a printer share,
you're still going to connect to it the same way.
To add that printer,
you're going to go into your network tab, find the device,
right click on it, and then click connect.
Once you do that,
if the device has been secured
to require a username and password,
you'll have to enter your username and password.
If not, you'll already be directly connected to it,
and it will show up
just like any other printer connected to your system.
Now, we've talked a lot
about print servers and printer shares,
but in addition to that,
there's actually something on your computer
that manages all of your print jobs for you.
And if you're sharing your printer with others
through a printer share,
it's also going to be managing their print tasks too,
and this is known as a print spooler.
Now the print spooler is a service
that's built into the Windows operating system,
and it exists to help order the print jobs
and interact with the printer
on behalf of the operating system.
If your print spooler stops working,
it has an error, or develops some other kind of problem,
then the print jobs will actually get stuck in the queue.
Print spoolers can become overwhelmed or corrupted
due to a lack of hard disk space as well
because the print spooler is actually
saving those print jobs
into a temporary file on your hard disk
until that printer is ready for that print job.
For example, if I start printing out
a new book that's 500 pages,
everything else behind it is going to get stuck in the spool
until those 500 pages have been printed out, and so,
if other people are printing lots of things,
it's going to be creating
all these temporary files on my hard drive
while waiting for that printer to be ready for the next job.
If this type of thing happens on your print spooler,
you're going to have to open up the print spooler,
and from there,
you can start, pause, or delete any pending jobs.
To do this,
you will need to be a system administrator on that system.
If you're not,
you'll only be able to pause, stop, or delete pending jobs.
Those created by other users
would have to be deleted by them.
In addition to having this print spooler
locally on your machine,
you also have this on the print server,
and so if you have a network printer
and you're responsible for managing it,
you may need to go into the print spooler
and be able to clear out jobs that are broken
or causing issues for the rest of the users.
When managing a large scale network
with lots of different printers,
we have to do this quite often
when some kind of a job gets stuck inside that print queue.
And to do that,
we have to use our administrative permissions
to log into that print spooler on the print server
and be able to clear out those jobs
that are causing problems for everybody else.
So remember, when it comes to printers,
there's two basic ways for you to share them.
One is by using a dedicated print server.
This can be a dedicated device,
an embedded device inside your printer,
or a dedicated server, such as Windows or Linux,
that's running your print spooler.
The second way is to be able to create a printer share,
and this is when you connect your printer
directly to a workstation,
and that workstation is connected to the network.
That workstation now acts as the entry point
for anybody else who wants to be able
to access that printer,
and this type of printer share only works well
in a home user environment
or a very small office environment.