Thursday, January 8, 2009

Need Help Terminal Server, Citrix, and Quickbooks

Here is the configuration, Windows 2003 with Terminal Server, Citrix and Quickbooks on the server among other applications we need to run the business. Clients are dumb terminals from NeoWare. Printers are old DOT Matrix (yeah I know come out of the dark ages)

*** side note we are still using applications that require win98 so that is also running on the server under virtual machines served up through Citrix as well. I know convoluted isn't it?***

Was sitting at the front desk on Wednesday after noon contemplating the Twitter issues I was experiencing waiting for the next pearl of wisdom to be tweeted, when from over the balcony I hear “Help”. Our administrative “do all” (she is not a secretary no way I would ever call her that she does way too much) is peering over the edge looking at me. We are trying to get a jump start on taxes this year so she is desperately trying to get the W2's printed out so we can file and get them out to employees as fast as possible. We know all to well that it has been a bad year for all and when sales are down so is everybody's paychecks this may help them get a bit of relief early.

Here is the problem this is the first year of using this version of Quickbooks on the server, version 2005 had no issues what so ever. 2008 on the other hand got finicky it would print one may be two W2's and then quit while the print spooler was showing jobs still in the queue. No matter what I did tweaks or tricks I could not get it to continue correctly. And the queue would not clear out no matter what I did till I took the printer off line and reset the print server (little linksys box with 2 lpt's and a usb port network connected). Thought it might be either the printer it self or the print server so I changed to another printer to no avail. Then hooked the printer directly to the Terminal still no good. By this time it is way past time for her to go home and I'm running out of patients so I decide we will wrap it up for the night and figure it out in the morning.

My final resolution was to bring my laptop up the next morning and connect it directly to the printer and print the W2's my self. This was not such an easy task either cause I rarely use it on my laptop so I had to go through all of the updates for the application and payroll updates. So it still took 2 hours to get through it.

Hope some one has some suggestions cause I don't want to have other issues with it this year.



1 comments:

Happy new year from Indonesia. Nice blog. Good Luck.

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