XP Home to print to a domain printer
We have our Samba domain with OpenLDAP running full speed now, with users on Windows XP Pro authenticating wonderfully to Samba, accessing shares here and there. However, one laptop was all it takes to make things a little bit challenging.
The Laptop
The laptop I just mentioned is an HP Pavilion dv2000 (dv2050us) running Windows XP Home. The unit was loaned by our CEO to our Operations Manager. Yep, I’m dealing with some “big” users here. We have just almost finished migrating every Windows user except for a select few who are handling huge amount of very critical emails and files and one of those was our Operations Manager.
The Problem
With her shiny new HP Pavilion laptop, our OpsMan (pardon the shortcut) has been successfully printing to a network share using her normal desktop (an XP Pro). But when she transferred to the HP Pavilion running XP Home, whenever she adds a printer and restarts the PC, the permissions to use the network printer is gone. It kept on happening a couple of times and she got tired of it so she decided to have her laptop checked. My IT Manager and I explained that XP Home is just not quite “designed” to work on corporate domains so we decided, with OpsMan’s approval, to have the laptop reformatted and installed with XP Pro. So I went ahead and downloaded HP’s “tons” of support files (drivers,utilities) from the official product site ready for the incoming “battle” with the Pavilion.
Not ready to be outdone and outwitted by the “crippled” MS product, I decided to take a look again and see if there’s something that I can do to simplify things and ultimately not do any formatting whatsoever.
Then *DING*! an idea.
The Fuss
XP Home only supports workgroups. Every MS-loving person knows it, every MS-hating person pukes thinking about it. However, there it is - XP Home in our local network with a Primary Domain Controller running Samba on top of SLES10 and an XP Home user needs to access network shares _seamlessly_ . Just great.
The Idea
The “idea” is not really new. It’s been around for years and years and MCSEs know of this, regular Windows admins know of this, perhaps average Joes know of this. Yes, you can make XP Home a “part” of your domain, somehow. How I did it? Well, the list of steps will explain itself. Read on.
The Steps
- 1. Create a user in your Windows XP Home that has the same username and password as a domain user. (This is actually a local profile).
- 2. Add the user to the Administrators group. (Don’t worry, this is just a local profile. But if you’re paranoid, then don’t
) - 3. Add a WINS server in the XP Home’s network card settings. (Make sure that you put the IP address of your Samba server.)
- 4. Add the computer to the “workgroup” which has the same name as your domain name. (Well, you actually are joining the PC _to_the domain since the “workgroup” doesn’t exist anyway.)
- 5. Restart.
- 6. Log in as the new user. (The one similar to the domain user account you’ve just created.)
- 7. Install the network printer. (I added a printer shared from an XP Pro machine.)
- 8. Do a test print.
- 9. Reboot and log in again and try if you can still access the printer.
- 10. Do another test print. (Not really needed.)
If you need to access or copy some files from the other profile, login to the old profile, and remove the check mark from “Make this folder private” setting and Apply. Log back in to the new account (domain account), and copy your files.
Hit me back if you hit some snags.
Enjoy!
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