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Last week, I received a call from a RemoteScope customer asking whether it was possible to deploy printers remotely in batch, like he could with applications and patches. In other words, could he add a printer to the list of installed printers on various Client systems around the network, without having to leave his office and without having to do them one at a time by remote control? I have a good idea how difficult it is to go around installing the printer drivers and adding network printers in a company that has more than 25 computers, so I decided to do some research to see if this could be done starting with our own network and a spare HP 1300 laser printer.

Getting started, I figured I had two options. The first was to create an MSI file using MSIMaker.exe or maybe even the Veritas MSI-creating software, which comes with most Windows 2000 Operating systems. The second was to wade through the technical data on HP’s website to see what they had to say about the matter.

Lucky for me, I decided first to pull out the installation disc that came with our HP 1300 printer just to see if it had any topics on deploying printers and guess what?… the splash screen had the option for “customized installation”.

Being a practical sort of guy (not lazy, practical!), I decided to tread what looked like the path of least resistance and see if I could use the customized installation process to create installation files that already have the details about my network printer needed for a remote installation. It went something like this:

As I loaded the HP CD installer that came with the printer it showed me this:

So I chose, “customization utility” which brought me to:

This took me through the steps in creating a customized installation by selecting language, network path (applies if the printer is a network printer), TCP/IP address (applies if the printer is a TCP/IP printer), selecting the printer’s model number, and selecting the programs I wanted to deploy along with the printer setup (eg. LaserJet tools, Screen Fonts, PostScript drivers).

The next step was to select a location to save the installation files. I chose to select a directory on my local machine since that’s where the RemoteScope Console was located that I use for deployment. After configuring the customized setup, the wizard created installation files at the location selected. These files turned out to be MSI files with CABs and INI’s.

I began to test the files by simply mapping the folder from another machine and executing the setup.exe file. This allows the user to further customize the installation or confirm the settings for which the installation was created.

The results of this were quite satisfactory, but what I really wanted was to create an installation that required no inputs from the user. Looking at the set of installation files created by the wizard, I found they also contain Help files and resources on options to deploy the setup. Furthermore, it has a text file called RESPONSE.INI that tells the installation how to respond to the installation prompts, similar to an ISS file. To do a slightly different installation, you can change specific values in this file so you won’t have to go through the entire customization wizard all over again.

After a few minutes of research and experimenting I came up with this command line that works:

setup.exe /s /l1033 /v"/qb! response=response.ini

So, now we know it can be done with at least one model of HP LaserJet. Whether you could do this with another make of printer should depend on whether they support a customized installation. The name of the file (response.ini) may well be different, but the basic operation should be much the same.