Hello everyone.
Thank you in advance for any help you can provide. I am responsible for our student labs at the university I work for. We have 100 XP workstations, as well as several Dell servers running Windows 2003 Server (one running Windows 2000 server)and 6 HP 8150/9000 LaserJets that the students print to continuously through the domain controller (let’s call it Server01).
Through Active Directory I have set up some folder redirection so that My Documents and the desktops of the workstations in the lab are found on Server01 (appropriate permissions configured here). Server01 is also the spot where the six shared printers can be found. They are controlled using a program called PCounter that runs services on Server01.
My primary problem is: how do I set up redundancy for the printers that are served off the domain controller? PCounter does not support clustering. Even if it did the servers I have aren’t all that powerful, don’t have multiple NICs and are 2003 Server Standard boxes.
I thought about just setting up a box that looks exactly like Server01 (Server01Test) and then just changing the name if Server01 fails. However, since Server01 is a domain controller, name changes aren’t easy.
Even if both boxes were member servers in the domain, there would still be a problem with changing the names.
I thought maybe someone could recommend some type of infrastructure for me that made more sense or direct me to some software that could help. Thank you.
Brad