Windows Printer Permissions issue

[Dustin Spicuzza]

I'm totally stumped by this problem, and right now just reaching for straws... and while I realize that this is not a bug of any kind on the server side of CUPS, maybe someone else has found a solution to this:

We're using a CUPS server to do printing, in conjunction with PyKota to do print accounting. Now, we do have 15 printers in one lab, and 8 in the other. Each lab also has a "main" printer that everyone in the lab can print to. All of these are directed through CUPS. After ghosting, the printers are set up to point to some generic printer, and we rename and change registry settings to get the printer to point to the correct CUPS printer. This renaming stuff is done automatically using a custom program, and not manually. We also load the "default users" ntdata.dat hive somewhere on the registry tree, and change the default users "Default Printer" to point to the proper printer, since Windows does not allow you to set up a global default printer (weird, eh? You can set everything else globally it seems... except printers). Maybe its this playing around with the registry keys that is causing problems... except that when we reboot (with the computer locked), everything goes back to how we expect it should be.

Anyways, every once in awhile (which comes out to be 5-10 times a day considering we have a couple thousand users cycle in and out of our labs each day), Windows reports that "You do not have access to this printer. Only the security tab will be displayed", and thats all that happens. The problem goes away upon reboot.

Has anyone else had this type of problem? Please see the referenced URL's for additional information if you have questions, but of course I will answer any that you may have. I just want a nice fix that doesn't involve giving everyone admin rights! LoL.


References:

http://forums.xpasystems.com/viewtopic.php?t=535

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.security_admin/browse_frm/thread/22f26b8104434b3c/f7c0d50704971e14?lnk=st&q=dustin+spicuzza&rnum=1&hl=en#f7c0d50704971e14