In ZENworks 7 and earlier, because printer policies were stored in eDirectory along with iPrint printer objects, deleting old iPrint printers would cause the printers to be removed from any printer policies that referenced them. Essentially, the referential integrity in eDirectory would automate the clean-up of printer policies. With ZENworks 11, printer policies no longer have any tie to the iPrint objects in eDirectory. In fact, with the iPrint Appliance, iPrint printers are contained in a completely different eDirectory tree than the one that ZENworks authenticates against. Printer policies end up containing old iPrint printers that no longer exist and ZCM keeps trying to push those non-existent printers to workstations. Eventually, there can be an accumulation of so many old iPrint printers in policies that you start to see error conditions on your iPrint server due to the number of failed installation attempts.
If a utility were added in ZCC and ZMAN to delete given printer URIs from any printer policies where they are used, this would allow administrators to quickly clean up old printer objects. This could be used by administrators when deleting a printer in iPrint in order to force the same sort of clean-up that eDirectory used to ensure. If the utility were also able to search within printer policies and list any policies that contain a given iPrint URI, this would allow administrators to identify policies that need to be updated after mass-deleting a given printer from all policies. This would be useful because if a printer is being deleted and removed from users, they would presumably want to print somewhere else. Finally, if the utility were able to not only provide the search functionality that I just mentioned, but also provide a mass-update feature so that you can replace any occurrences of a particular iPrint URI with another iPrint URI, and perhaps even let an administrator select the individual policies that you want to update at one time so that you can replace the old printer A with new printer B in some policies while replacing it with new printer C in other policies, that would be a very useful feature. This would complement and perhaps provide a ZENworks policy-based alternative for deleted-printer redirection in iPrint.
Providing a utility to automate the maintenance of printer policies and keep them in sync with changes to an iPrint system would save administrators time in either checking with an iPrint server to see which clients are trying to install non-existent printers and then tracking down and modifying the applicable printer policies trying to dump all of the policies to text with ZMAN and then grep through the results. It would bring back functionality that was lost with the transition of ZENworks off of eDirectory.
by: Cory C. | over a year ago | Policy Mgmt
Comments
And this would require some cooperation from the iPrint team as well.