We have 25 remote sites all with their own networked iPrint printers. The iPrint manager is located at our centrally located HQ. The challenge was to be able to set the default network printer for Citrix users on each of these sites.

All of our users login via Citrix Xenapp 5 running on Windows 2003 servers. The servers have Novell Client 4.91 SP5 and iPrint 4.32. The network printers have all been installed on these servers.

To set a default network printer we added the following to the users’ container login script :

# rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /y /n "Printername"

The printer name is the name displayed in the printers box in windows. In our case when we installed the printers the names were rather long because they contained the printer name and url, so all of printers were renamed in windows to just the object name.

We have found one gotcha with this, when a user logs in for the first time an error message is displayed :

Click to view.

Once the user selects ok the default printer is set and is saved in their windows profile. After that the message is never displayed again, except when a user has a new profile or if their account is moved to another container/site.

This script does not take into account locally attached printers which are normally the default.