I work for a state government agency and administer several sites in our region. Long ago, the state WAN administrators gave us a small subnet for our main site. As it grew, we were given other small subnets for our LAN until we ended up with a total of 5 non-contiguous logical subnets on one physical network. Because of router load problems and performance hits, we made an appeal to the state and received one class c network to replace the 5. We are now faced with the problem of moving about 30 HP network printers to the new subnet, to which 130 nt/2000 clients print to an average of 3 each. All of our clients use direct IP printing.
We have looked at several possibilities, including going to a print server and having everyone delete their printers then pick from the server, but have found the server to frequently have problems in beta testing a small group.
Another solution we looked at was writing a script using tools from the Windows NT resource kit that will search for certain printer IP port information in the registry and replace that with updated ip addresses that we would assign to the printers, etc… The problem with this method is that we are afraid of a fairly high number of problems that could be caused if things go wrong with a registry editing script.
A final solution, which we are trying to avoid, is manually fixing every desktop.
Any suggestions or practices that have worked for others would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks