Printing with Citrix

Sep 25, 2010 - and buy a new HP printer, install the driver on your print server, test it to find it is ... Hewlett Packard print drivers have different and incompatible ...
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Printing with Citrix

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http://users.tpg.com.au/penneh/citrixexpert/Printing.htm

Printing with Citrix I have heard more complaints about printing with Citrix XenApp than anything else. I know of 6 different ways to set up printers with Citrix XenApp - not all of them are good: Auto-created printers: The easiest to set up and the hardest to get reliable. Can use the Citrix Universal Print Driver (UPD) or native printer drivers. Citrix Session Printers: Set up a print server, import it and use Citrix policies to allocate printers. This is highly reliable and a preferred method. Requires a native driver. Direct IP printing to a local IP port: In my experience this is the most reliable but is not scaleable. When you have dozens of Citrix servers and dozens of printers is totally unmanageable. If you only have 2 Citrix servers and 8 printers then this may be your best option if you want simple and reliable. Use permissions to prevent the users in one office printing to the printer in another office. Requires a native driver. Start, Settings Printers, Add Printers: Letting your users add their own printers to a Citrix server from a Citrix desktop in inviting disaster. Every time they do this they copy the native printer driver for that printer to that server and that server alone. Block your users from doing this with a Windows policy unless you want to make you life MUCH more interesting, in a bad way. Map printers using a Visual Basic script: Some people include printer mapping in the logon script. This does work but copies a native driver on to the Citrix server but is usually only done by people who don't really "get" Citrix. Usually not a good idea but in some cases can be workable. There must be a high level of control of the printer drivers used on the Windows print servers. ThinPrint: This is a third party printing product. See www.thinprint.com for details. Can use native drivers or a universal print driver. In my opinion ThinPrint fills a need in Terminal Services but Citrix XenApp printing has improved with version 4 upwards that I don't see much point to ThinPrint in a Citrix environment now. Notice ThinPrint creates its own directory for it's "driverless printing" driver.

PRINTER DRIVERS - THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL The .dll files of one printer driver can overwrite another and break it. Or worse still the Microsoft UNIDRV.DLL file. Some print drivers that are fully Microsoft compatible can cause the start-up process of a Citrix XenApp sessions to hang leaving that user (and in some cases all who come after them) with a partly open but hung Citrix session. Your print spooler will also be in an unstable state. The drivers on your Windows 2003 CD are the safest source of drivers. Even if you have to use a compatible driver from an earlier model of printer.

25/09/2010 12:08

Printing with Citrix

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http://users.tpg.com.au/penneh/citrixexpert/Printing.htm

Citrix printing is not the same as Windows printing. Just as an exercise set up a new Windows server and list the files in: C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\w32x86\3 Now install Citrix XenApp and have a look at how many more files are installed here. Obviously there is a lot more stuff going on than in normal Windows printing. Printer drivers have a bunch of .dll files with each of them. As manufacturers release new models they don't write new drivers from scratch they tend to modify previous drivers and create later versions of the .dll files. On a normal Windows Print server you can have a HP LaserJet 4100 that has been working for years and buy a new HP printer, install the driver on your print server, test it to find it is working fine and suddenly find your HP LaserJet 4100 no longer works. Why? Because the HP LaserJet 4100 driver files have been over written by incompatible .dll files. Which drivers break which other printer can be be very difficult to track down. You may then be able to get a new compatible driver for the old printer. HP is actually very good here as they try to document driver incompatibilities when they occur and release updated drivers for the old printers. Some other manufacturers haven't got a clue about the compatibility of their products. The multi-function printer/scanner/fax devices tend to cause more problems than printer only devices however you can sometimes get a driver that is printer only. I would recommend trying these first. You can often tell by how big a driver is how much rubbish is in there. If it is 2MB then it is fairly lean and mean but if it is a 50MB file then your are getting a lot more than a printer driver. Often you can substitute a driver from a non-Multi-function printer model to avoid the big ugly driver. Hewlett Packard print drivers have different and incompatible versions of the same .dll files. We have experienced significant problems with the following files: hpbcfgre.dll and hpcdmc32.dll The compatibility problems between printers cause user sessions to hang during user session start-up during the cmstart.exe process. As a result the user never has the application come up. Worse still, all subsequent users of that Citrix server will have their session hang on the cmstart.exe process too. The server requires manual intervention to clear the hung sessions. DRIVER VERSIONS Look at the versions of drivers used below. Do you spot a problem? If not, think about the paragraph above and look again. (The farm name has been removed to protect the guilty.)

25/09/2010 12:08

Printing with Citrix

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http://users.tpg.com.au/penneh/citrixexpert/Printing.htm

They have used up to 4 drivers for each different model of printer. These were just randomly downloaded from the Internet over a period of time. These guys had lots of problems with printers not being created and sessions hanging on start-up. I fixed their problems by DELETING ALL NATIVE DRIVERS and having them just use the Citrix Universal Print Driver (UPD) for everything. I have found the UPD will work for most things except plotters.

HOST BASED DRIVERS - Be afraid, be very afraid! A serious printer will just take a PCL or PostScript job and use the intelligence in the printer to process the job. Host based printers are cheaper and don't have the intelligence to process the print jobs so they get the driver to process the print jobs back on your Citrix server. This causes: a lot more network traffic, extra CPU load on the Citrix server and most of these drivers are not Citrix friendly and can cause a range of problems. While it depends on the specific driver I have seen them overwrite the Microsoft unidrv.dll file and other .dll files that can hang the server, prevent other people from logging on, stop the print spooler service and other bad stuff. WORKAROUND: If you find that your company has lots of Host based printers many of them can accept PCL4 print jobs so use the HP LaserJet Series II driver installed as part of the Citrix server install. You will lose some features but your printing will be much more reliable. As for the cheap host based printers like Canon BubbleJet printers, if they don't work as an Auto-created printer with the Citrix Universal Print Driver insist that they be removed from the network or at least let users know that they are not supported by Citrix. (Even Canon will tell you that the small BubbleJets are designed for a domestic market not an enterprise network.)

These printers with host based drivers can be made to work but years of experience tell me that they will be more trouble than they are worth.

25/09/2010 12:08

Printing with Citrix

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http://users.tpg.com.au/penneh/citrixexpert/Printing.htm

If your company has an IT procurement process create a list of approved printers and make it necessary to have Citrix administrator approval before a model of printer is added to the approved list. If a manager just buys a printer outside the approval process have the printer sold on www.eBay.com PRINTING TO NON-WINDOWS CLIENTS If people are using Wyse terminals, UNIX Clients, DOS clients or other devices then the auto-created printer may not be an option. Start thinking about sessions printers first as it will almost certainly be your best option. Installing local printers printing to local IP ports may be an option in a small environment but it lacks scalability.

MY PREFERRED PRINTERS You might think I have given a fair bit of stick to HP but actually HP printers will be my first choice for a Citrix environment. I have found Lexmark to be quite good too. Also read this: http://www.brianmadden.com/content/article/Citrix-Printing-Brush-up-on-the-basic-best-practices

Please peer review this site. I value your feedback. If you have any questions or comments about any area of this web site please e-mail. Thanks and abuse are equally welcome. Copyright © 2007, 2008 Mark Ellis

www.citrixexpert.com.au

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The drivers listed below can be substituted for virtually any native driver. The drivers that came on the Windows 2003 Server CD are the safest source. There are printers like Konica, Ricoh and Xerox that have drivers with poor Citrix compatibility. It is better to just use the LaserJet 4 driver rather than the native driver. You will lose features but it will at least be reliable on Citrix XenApp. Sometimes it takes people a while to get their head around the idea of buying a Konica and installing a LaserJet 4 driver. You can put 2 print queues to the same printer on your pint server with different printer drivers. One is used for Citrix only and the other for Windows XP printing. Just make sure the native driver does not end up on your Citrix server. Canon BubbleJet BJC-210 - (Don't do BubbleJets, they will be nothing but trouble.) Canon BubbleJet BJC-4000 - (Don't do BubbleJets, they will be nothing but trouble.) Generic / Text Only Epson Stylus COLOR ESC/P 2 HP Color LaserJet HP Color LaserJet 4500 HP DeskJet HP DeskJet 550C HP DeskJet 850C HP DeskJet 855C HP LaserJet HP LaserJet Series II HP LaserJet 1100 (MS) HP LaserJet 2100 HP LaserJet 4 HP LaserJet 5 HP LaserJet 6P HP LaserJet 4000 Series PCL HP LaserJet 8100 Series PCL HP OfficeJet Lexmark Optra

25/09/2010 12:08

Printing with Citrix

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http://users.tpg.com.au/penneh/citrixexpert/Printing.htm

Lexmark 1020 Color Jetprinter Printer Type Brother Epson Epson Stylus HP DeskJet Series

HP LaserJet Series

HP LaserJet 1000 series HP LaserJet 2000 series HP LaserJet PCL Series HP OfficeJet Series Lanier Konica Lexmark Default Lexmark Jetprinter series Lexmark T Series Lexmark Z Series Lexmark Optra Series Ricoh Color Printers PDF Writers Fax Printers

Remaps to HP LaserJet 4 HP LaserJet 4 HP LaserJet 5 Epson Stylus COLOR ESC/P 2 HP DeskJet HP DeskJet 550C HP DeskJet 850C HP DeskJet 855C HP LaserJet HP LaserJet Series II HP LaserJet 4 HP LaserJet 5 HP LaserJet 1100 (MS) HP LaserJet 2100 HP LaserJet 4000 Series PCL HP OfficeJet HP LaserJet 4000 Series PCL HP LaserJet 4 HP LaserJet 4 Lexmark 1020 Color Jetprinter HP LaserJet 4 HP LaserJet 5 UPD Lexmark Optra HP LaserJet 4 HP Color LaserJet HP LaserJet 5 HP Color LaserJet 4500 Generic / Text Only

Good Clock for windows time updates: clock.isc.org

25/09/2010 12:08