VMware ESXi – Adding a USB device to a Guest Virtual Machine
KB ID 0000778 Problem About a week ago a client asked me how to do this, and I was surprised I’d not got it covered on the site. I have already covered how to do this with VMware Workstation, but never got round to doing the same for ESX. There are a myriad of reasons why you may need to do this, either to connect a UPS, a printer, thumb drive, or a software dongle etc. But the process is identical. Solution 1. USB pass through...
Windows – Location Based Printing with con2prt
KB ID 0000510 Problem Yes these days we would prefer to use GPO or GPP to do this, but some printers simply refuse to be farmed out this way, and a lot of clients don’t want to install their network printers in that manner. Con2prt is a very old piece of software it’s part of the Windows NT4 ZAK (Yep it’s that old!). Its purpose in life is to connect clients to printers. So how can we do that based on location? We...
Mapping Printers based on Computer OU (via Script)
KB ID 0000645 Problem Location based printing has long been a pain. In the past I’ve tackled it with Group Policy Preferences, and I’ve even gone ‘old school’ and mapped printers with con2prt. A few months ago I put in a new network at a school, they were using a vbs script to deploy all their classroom printers, and I had a quick (unsuccessful) attempt to do the same. But time was against me and I used GPP...
Windows – Print Spooler Keeps Stopping
KB ID 0000751 Problem This is quite a common problem, in MOST cases the problem is caused by a print driver that Windows does not like. But my printers are delivered via login script or group policy? If that is the case then you need to exempt both your user and the computer from this method of printer deployment while you are troubleshooting. Solution 1. As we cant be sure what printer/driver is causing the problem, we need to remove...
Allow Users to Install Printers with Group Policy
KB ID 0000148 Problem Ordinary domain users cannot install printer drivers, because installing a printer driver requires “rights”. So unless you have installed the print driver as an administrator, the users cannot add a new printer, without logging on with administrative privileges, installing the printer and driver, then logging back on as the user, only at that point can they install the printer. To stop this happening...