Tag: Printers

Adding Printers will Hang a Vista Logon to a Domain

When you’re setting up a Windows Vista system on your network for the first time, you might find that adding printers becomes an issue because the UAC prompt appears.

Unfortunately, if you do this with a logon script – then the logon will hang until the script timeout expires. Worse still, if you’re using Group Policy Preferences to set up the printer it will cause the logon to hang indefinitely.

If you’re experiencing this problem – then you need to make sure that the Trusted Printer settings are either configured correctly, or disabled so that printer installation behaves as it would in previous versions of Windows such as 2000 and XP.

Firstly, you’ll need to open the Group Policy Management console, and navigate to the OU which contains the user accounts that are likely to add printers and edit the policy.

Open User Settings >Administrative Templates > Control Panel > Printers.

To prevent Vista from ever prompting to install the printer drivers, simply disable the Point and Print Restrictions setting. If you need to control where printers can be installed from then you need to edit the Approved Servers setting instead.

If you’ve used group policy preferences, make sure that you’ve set the Run in logged-on user’s security context option.

Once configured, you should be able to log on with a user account that automatically adds the printer without a hitch.

Get Those Passwords

Today, I had to setup an Oki C5650 on a network, and find out how many pages had passed through it due to an surprisingly quick turnaround in toner. I was struggling to find the default admin password for the web interface as it wasn’t in the online manual.

Knowling that searching the internet is much better than my library abilities, I managed to find the password at Art of Hacking. In true form, there’s a very useful page that has user collected default passwords for thousands of devices. And in true hacking form, it’s called etc/passwd.

Xerox Phaser drivers print very dark in Vista

I was having a great deal of trouble installing printer drivers in Vista for the Xerox Phaser 6100.

Online, Xerox say that the XP drivers wok fine in Vista, so use them until the new drivers come out. I’ve spent two hours trying the get the badger to work.

And what was it in the end? Stupid driver defaults!

  • Right-click on the printer
  • Click run as administrator
  • Click properties
  • Clear any UAC prompts
  • Click on the Advanced tab
  • Click ‘Printing Defaults…’
  • Click Graphics
  • Click ‘Adjust Color’
  • Click ‘reset’
  • Keep pressing OK until the windows are cleared

Now send a print job! That’s it. Really!

Returning Printer Rubbish

I’ve been sitting on some toner cartridges for some time wondering how I could return them. They have travelled many miles in my car, acted as a prop for bags and generally been in the way at any other time.

By some luck (and a bit of clever Google searching), I managed to find a page with instructions for returning used toner cartridges in the UK for my Oki printer.

It would have been nice if the instructions were included in the toner box. Still, you can’t have everything I suppose.

Setting up an Oki C5450 in linux with CUPS

I finally completed getting all of my printers working together nicely today.

It’s been a while, but I must admit that while I’m using the Windows XP virtual machine for my office work, the need to print in Linux is not that great.

Oddly, the HP psc 2510 was the first to behave itself. Using the HPLIP toolbox that comes with Ubuntu, I found myself scanning like a demon in no time. The toolbox also seems to scan much faster than the proprietary HP Windows-based driver (and as a bonus doesn’t insist on installing over 100MB of software on your computer).

Anyway, after sorting out some DNS issues I happened to be having, I found it was nice and easy to set up the printer. You’ll need to download the Oki driver from Oki.

  1. Open up your web browser
  2. In the address bar type in http://localhost:631
  3. Click ‘Add Printer’ and enter the name of the printer, and other bits that CUPS asks for. Click ‘Continue’
  4. In the ‘Device’ list, select ‘Internet printing protocol (ipp)’ and click ‘Continue’
  5. In the ‘Device URI’ textbox, enter http://printerip/ipp, replacing printerip with the name or IP address of your printer. Click ‘Continue’
  6. In the Make/Manufacturer, click ‘Browse’ and select the driver that you have downloaded. Click ‘Add Printer’
  7. Click on the printer name, and send a test print to the printer.

As long as all of the settings are correct, the Oki should spring into life.

The web configuration page outlines the valid ipp addresses, but here they are for completeness.

http://hostname/ipp
http://hostname:631/ipp
http://hostname/ipp/lp
http://hostname:631/ipp/lp

Remember to replace hostname with your printer’s network address.