Windows print server

1. What is windows print server?
Ans – A print server, or printer server, is a device that connects printers to client computers over a network. It accepts print jobs from the computers and sends the jobs to the appropriate printers.

2.How does a window print server work?
Ans – Normally, a server operating system is installed on the print server computer and then the office’s various printers can be added to the system with the appropriate drivers. The new printers are then set up to be shared from the print server, so that employees can access them from their individual workstations.

3.What is print spooling?
Ans – In print spooling, documents are loaded into a buffer (usually an area on a disk), and then the printer pulls them off the buffer at its own rate. Because the documents are in a buffer where they can be accessed by the printer, you can perform other operations on the computer while the printing takes place in the background. Spooling also lets you place a number of print jobs on a queue instead of waiting for each one to finish before specifying the next one.

4.What is windows universal print driver?
Ans – (Universal Printer Driver or Unidriver) is a GDI-based Microsoft Windows universal printer driver and architecture for non-PostScript printers. It is used to simplify driver development of non-PostScript printers (also called Winprinters) for printer manufacturers. Unidrv allows the creation of a printer-specific minidriver in the form of a GPD (Generic Printer Description) file, similar to a PPD file, which is much simpler than kernel mode driver development.

5.What is a XPS and EMF print drivers?
Ans – Universal XPS Printer driver -
This driver is based on the Windows XML Paper Specification (XPS) printing technology introduced in Windows Server 2008. Windows XPS printing technology uses XML to create a platform-independent “electronic paper” similar to Adobe’s PDF format. The XPS format is a device-independent XML-based spool file format that provides a compressed XML description of a page’s graphic elements. Printing devices can use XPS-formatted print jobs directly without translation.
The Citrix Universal XPS Printer driver creates the XPS print job using the Microsoft XPS printer driver on the client device. The Citrix Universal XPS Printer driver obtains printing device-specific information from the client device. Provided your farm servers are running XenApp 5.0 and your client devices have .NET 3.0 installed on them, which comes with Windows
Vista, you can use the Citrix Universal XPS Printer driver.
Citrix Universal Printer driver -
This driver uses Windows’ Enhanced Metafile Format (EMF) technology.EMF is a device-independent format for capturing the graphical elements printed on each page of a print job. A client-side renderer uses EMF and provides a substantial reduction in the processing time of Citrix Universal print jobs on the client.

Windows 2003 vs Windows 2008

1)         Windows 2003 vs Windows 2008

§  Full and Core Installation-Windows 2008 gives you two installation types, Full installation and Server Core installation which helps to reduce the cost of the hardware for instance if have a requirement to install only DNS or DHCP server to particular location or site. then you can choose core installation and install DNS or DHCP, it can be installed on low hardware resources machine as it would not install unnecessary Drivers and roles that requires for enhanced GUI. However, It wasn’t available in windows 2003.

§  Operating System Installation is faster- Windows server 2008 Installation is faster because it’s 32 bit where as 2003 it is 16 bit. It deploys the image of operating system rather than coping the files in 2003.

§  Changes in RIS- Windows deployment services (WDS) instead of RIS in 2003 server

§  Service is renamed to Role -Services are known as role in windows server 2008, like Active Directory has been renamed to Active Directory DomainServices (AD DS)

§  Changes in Boot sequence- Windows server 2008 Boot sequence is changed

§  Virtualization- Hyper-V is the main difference between windows 2003 and windows 2008

§  PowerShell- PowerShell been fully supported, you can manage easily using PowerShell script and PowerShell commands

§  Active Directory- There are many changes in Active Directory like Active Directory is a service now that can be restarted. RODC is a new type of DC introduce in windows 2008. Group policy preference mode is introduced.  New number of AD templates have been introduced in 2008. DFS is being used for replication instead of FRS in 2003.

§  Security- Windows basic security has been Improved, features like Bitlocker

§  Windows Cluster – There are many new feature been introduced in windows 2008 cluster like new quorum types and GPT disk support  

§  DNS – There are some new features been introduced in DNS 2008 

§   Disk Management – Disk Management has more features like Extend and Shrink feature that Administrator can used to increase or decrease the Existing volumes Disk space more accurately and easily.

§  Print Server – In Windows 2008 Print Server will give enhanced admin management experience like you can install Drivers remotely from any other windows machine through Print Management snap-in. Print administrator delegation is also a new feature of windows 2008 R2

§  Power Saving Feature – New power-saving features been introduced in windows server 2008. It includes updated support for Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) processor power management (PPM) features, including support for processor performance states (P-states) and processor idle sleep states on multiprocessor systems. These features can be managed through Group Policies.

§  Hardware Compatibility – Windows Server 2008 can support more Hardware than 2003.

2)           FSMO Roles

In this post let's talk about the FSMO Roles. As we all know Active Directory is a Multi Master Replication
Model. Means Clients can register their records in  any available Active Directory Domain  Controller as well as they can access resources within Active Directory NTDS.Dit Database. Before you learn how to transfer FSMO Roles you must have a better understating why do we use FSMO roles, the answer is to avoid Conflicts in Active Directory . In old day there was only single master Replication. Primary DNS used
to have a read and write copy of DNS Data, Means Client Must locate their DNS Server and register their
resources in order to locate all other resources in Active Directory Domain Infrastructure. The main Drawback of Single Master Replication was single point of failure. If in case the Primary DNS was not reachable Clients Could not Register it's records to other domain Controller. Primary zone is forward look up zone in AD. And it's highly recommended to have reverse look up zone in all size of Network because it contains host names and IP Mapping Information.
So the Main purpose of FSMO roles is to avoid conflicts in AD and if there is any changes and update in AD FSMO Roles will take of it accordingly. We have Five Roles in FSMO

1: Schema Master 
2:Domain Naming Master
3:Infrastructure Master
4:RID(Relative ID) Master
5: PDC Emulator Master

1: Schema Master: This role is forest wide role and it is responsible for any update and medication or if there is any changes in Schema. Once the update is complete it will replicate these updates to other domain
controllers in the forest. There can be only one schema master in the whole forest.

2:Domain Naming Master: This is also a Forest wide Role. And it is responsible for if there is any addition and Removal of Domain in the Forest.When you create a new domain in an existing forest, the new domain represents a separate naming context and a new Cross-Ref object must be created in a Partitions container. As we know only one Domain Naming Master is allowed to make changes in Partition Container
in the forest . By default first Domain Controller in the forest would hold this role however you can transfer this to other domain Using Active Directory Domain and Trust in.

3:Infrastructure Master Role:   This role is responsible for updating the objects SID and distinguish name in cross domain object references. as it is domain wide role there can be only one domain controller acting as the infrastructure master in each domain.

4:RID(Relative ID) : All object in Active Directory Domain have a Security Identifier (SID)  which is a combination of Domain ID and sequential number called Relative ID which is supplied by Relative ID. It is a domain wide role. In Domains that are in Default in windows server 2000 mixed domain functional level only PDC Emulator create Security Principle. That's the reason RID and PDC Emulator are held by a domain controller so that it can ensure that SID is unique and sequential.

5:PDC Eumlator: PDC Emulator has a very unique Role. you might have seen in the offices when you Enter your user name and password which you have been provided by Administrator you are logged on , In some cases you might have seen you get an error message which says invalid user name and password. Have you ever thought how do you get that error message . when you enter the wrong user name and password domain controller checks for the password and for the confirmation it sends user's credential to the PDC Emulator. Because PDC Emulator contains the latest information about the objects credentials . if it finds that user has entered the wrong user name and password then user gets an error message on the screen invalid user name and password. when an Administrator change or reset the password those information are updated at the same time in PDC Emulator.
Apart from this PDC Emulator perform other task as well. I believe now you have the better knowledge of FSMO Roles now you will learn how to transfer the FSMO roles.