Allowing XP Home Clients To Access Active Directory Printers
- by Sean M
My school's network is based on Active Directory on Windows Server 2003 servers. Most of the computers in the school are members of the domain. However, we also acquired a passel of netbooks that are running Windows XP Home (as netbooks tend to), and we're trying to make those useful. The netbooks are made available to students by check-out, so none of them are dedicated to a specific user.
I only want to allow the netbooks to do two significant network activities: to access the Internet (this is working acceptably well so far), and to print to one or more printers on the network.
That second one is where trouble starts.
I'm trying to find a way to allow the XP Home clients to access those Active Directory printers. All the solutions that I can come up with right now are expensive, ugly, or both - for example, changing the OS on the netbooks (even with imaging, that would take a lot of my time) or making sure that the user account on each netbook has a matching account in Active Directory with permissions for printing (invites security/maintainability disaster).
Are there any elegant solutions? Failing that, what's the best ugly solution for allowing my students to print from the netbooks?
