Am in 'discussion' with a colleague of mine trying to find a solution to providing access to geographically close printers without the need for user intervention in the following scenario.
There are multiple sites within the organisation, and within those are departments and sub-departments. Some printers are based in a particular room, others are linked with a particular department.
Its a large Citrix farm and, currently, printers are mapped during the user logon, based on their logon script. There are a good number of terminals (thin client and desktop PC) and a number of laptop users, and therein lies the problem.
What we want to do is to have a user, with a laptop, arrive at any given office, connect to the network and receive mapping(s) to printer(s) that are geographically close to them.
The naming convention for the machines connected to the network consists of a 5 digit number, then a -, and then information about the department and/or room. All terminals start with a specific number, all laptops with another number, and so its relatively easy to check, at login, what the machine name is, and work out if its a laptop or terminal. However, what we can't work out is how to take the second part of the machine name, the department/room information and extract that to allow us to map the terminals to their local network printers, and, perhaps even more critically, what the easiest way to find out where a laptop has logged in from is, so we can then map them to the printers that are close to them.
I am guessing that we need to find some way of allocating IP addresses to machines based on their geographical location, and then using the IP address as the method for detecting where they are and which printers they require, but as for how this can be achieved I am really not sure.
I just wondered if anyone out there has anything like this in place, or could offer any pointers as to how this can be achieved with the least amount of disruption. The issue is critical enough for the idea of completely re-desiging DHCP scopes to reflect IP address ranges in geographical areas could well be considered, but, even then, I just can't picture in my mind how this would work.
The terminals are not much of a problem, as they are static and can be mapped via a logon script, its the laptop that poses the biggest problem. As there are several hundred printers, we really don't want the Citrix session to try and offer all of them as it will slow down just about everything!!
Anyone got any ideas or experience of having done something similar?
many thanks
edlcsre
There are multiple sites within the organisation, and within those are departments and sub-departments. Some printers are based in a particular room, others are linked with a particular department.
Its a large Citrix farm and, currently, printers are mapped during the user logon, based on their logon script. There are a good number of terminals (thin client and desktop PC) and a number of laptop users, and therein lies the problem.
What we want to do is to have a user, with a laptop, arrive at any given office, connect to the network and receive mapping(s) to printer(s) that are geographically close to them.
The naming convention for the machines connected to the network consists of a 5 digit number, then a -, and then information about the department and/or room. All terminals start with a specific number, all laptops with another number, and so its relatively easy to check, at login, what the machine name is, and work out if its a laptop or terminal. However, what we can't work out is how to take the second part of the machine name, the department/room information and extract that to allow us to map the terminals to their local network printers, and, perhaps even more critically, what the easiest way to find out where a laptop has logged in from is, so we can then map them to the printers that are close to them.
I am guessing that we need to find some way of allocating IP addresses to machines based on their geographical location, and then using the IP address as the method for detecting where they are and which printers they require, but as for how this can be achieved I am really not sure.
I just wondered if anyone out there has anything like this in place, or could offer any pointers as to how this can be achieved with the least amount of disruption. The issue is critical enough for the idea of completely re-desiging DHCP scopes to reflect IP address ranges in geographical areas could well be considered, but, even then, I just can't picture in my mind how this would work.
The terminals are not much of a problem, as they are static and can be mapped via a logon script, its the laptop that poses the biggest problem. As there are several hundred printers, we really don't want the Citrix session to try and offer all of them as it will slow down just about everything!!
Anyone got any ideas or experience of having done something similar?
many thanks
edlcsre