Configure Location Awareness
Hi, I have an issue on my Win7 Pro 64-bit. The location awareness service apparently identifies all sites of our corporate network as being the same site (it uses our domain name for this). Therefore I will have to change printers manually again if I go from site to site because the default printer for that site will always stay the same. Is there any way that I can configure the location awareness service to use /24 network ranges to differentiate between the different sites (or something similar)? It is really annoying to have the feature available but not be able to use it because the service always identifies the sites as being the same. We are using different Class C networks in all the sites that I am visiting (10.x.y.0/24) but they are all under 10.0.0.0/8. I have had a look around but maybe didn´t use the right search terms as everything I found was about setting the printer for different sites. Thanks
April 2nd, 2010 5:04pm

Nobody?
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April 8th, 2010 4:40pm

do you mean printer location tracking? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb727034.aspxor location aware printing? http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424302(WS.10).aspxor network location awareness (NLA)? i'm guessing you want to use the first option. we use this a lot. you'll need to get busy setting up proper subnet objects in your AD instead of using that all-encompassing /8 supernet. you can then populate the Location attributes against each subnet object & match that by populating the Location attribute of all of your published printer objects. or maybe connect printers via GPO/GPP instead.
April 10th, 2010 9:50am

I actually mean the second option. The new feature introduced with Windows 7. If my understanding is correct, the network location awareness and location aware printing are connected, since the later uses the information provided by the former to create "network location objects" (not sure if they are called like this) that you can assign default printers to. What I want to do is to be able to configure when Win 7 decides that the network I connect to is a new network. Since I am moving between sites a lot, it would be nice if I didn´t have to switch printers all the time manually.
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April 10th, 2010 9:18pm

i think you're stuck. based on this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee424313(WS.10).aspx it seems to me that (like a number of other aspects of Win7) when the doco says "network" what it really means in this context is "domain".it's a little wierd, in my opinion.maybe you can define your various sites/campuses/locations within Network & Sharing Center?a Win7 notebook pc i have with WWAN & ICS running seems to frequently "create" new "networks", and then sometimes asks me to "join networks together". this doesn't seem to be related to routing nor bridging, but more "consolidate your messy list of locations".
April 11th, 2010 8:34am

another consideration for you (assuming you are using AD, printservers, point & print - although it might be fine without):http://blogs.technet.com/grouppolicy/archive/2009/06/24/gp-preferences-set-a-default-printer.aspx
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April 11th, 2010 10:57am

Hi MadPAM, I have the same issue. I do not think that location aware printing should not consider you on the same "network" if you are on the same domain but change subnets. I have also not been able to find any information on this. I've been trying to find some work around for this and have the following quesitons for anyone that can answer them. Is there any way to force a subnet on the same domain to be identifed differently? Does anyone know how location aware printing detects this information? Can I set something in DHCP to change detection? Thanks, Ryan
May 5th, 2010 5:30pm

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