Printer Options Not Available For User With Restricted Permissions
we recentlty updated our label printer's driver (seagull drivers of course ;-)) ) to the latest available version (7.3). Unfortunately these new drivers behave different as the old ones did:
For security reasons we are working in a restricted environment under Windows XP. Users are only granted the permissions held by the builtin "users" group. With the old drivers (7.1.6) it was possible to open the driver-specific options dialog within the printing-dialog (after selection the appropriate label printer from the list). With the new driver version: Nothing. No dialog, no message, no error. Just nothing!
We did some research an found the following: When trying to open the options-dialog, the old driver creates four files named ss#X.tmp (where X is a changing number) in the users temporary directory (i.e. environment variable %temp%). The new version however tries to create these files in a subfolder "Seagull\Drivers\Temp" within the "all users" profile (the location is obviously read from "HKLM\SOFTWARE\MICROSOFT\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders\Common AppData").
Problem: Insufficient user rights for members of the builtin "users" group on the "all users" profile (provided "as is" by Microsoft). Adding the user to the "power users" group solves the problem but is not an option for our production environment, as mentioned above.
Is there any option in the new driver to restore the previous driver behaviour? If not, will you provide such an option with an upcoming version? Maybe the driver can try to write to the new location and (if it fails) then falls back to the old bahaviour?
Any help is highly appreciated!!!
Regards
Carmen
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The folder in question is a folder that is created and owned by us for use by the printer driver:
C:\ProgramData\Seagull\Drivers\Temp
In more recent versions of the driver we changed to this specific location as some Anti-Virus programs were giving false positives on us running code from a shared temporary folder like with the older versions.
Is it not possible to grant your "Users" group sufficient access to this folder? I think the "Read and execute" permission is required at the least.
I feel that the present location for these temp files is more logical and easier to manage for specific situations rather than reverting back to previous functionality; because of this I don't think the drivers will go back to the older way of doing things. Of course we will keep this under review should we be proved wrong, or a third way come to light.0 -
Legacy Poster
★ BarTender Hero ★
First of all thanks for your immediate reply!
The "read an execute" permission is already granted on this specific folder (in our environment it's located under "c:\dokumente und einstellungen\all users\anwendungsdaten\seagull\drivers\temp" -> the specific location for the german Windows XP version) by default and obviously it's not sufficient. Problem in this case ist the creation of the temporary files by the driver. This action fails because the users cannot write to this folder.
The only place on the local machine where users can create/modify files is within the folders of their own userprofile.
All our changes that have an impact on security have to go through an external security audit, so this is very complex and time-consuming.
So there is/will be no option to bypass/overwrite the new behaviour (maybe by configuration or sthg.)?
Regards
Carmen0 -
I fear the problem is that we cannot please everybody all of the time. If we make changes to satisfy you, it may well end up causing problems with others. One problem I foresee is that a global driver feature having stuff stored in a specific user profile no longer makes it global.
I will pass this onto development for their input and thoughts as I'm not fully up to speed with what these temp files are used for in all use cases.0 -
Legacy Poster
★ BarTender Hero ★
Thank you Ian!
I think now i understand your point of view. Your strategy is to keep all settings as global as possible, maybe even predefined for all users.
For the moment we will revert to the 7.1.x-version and see how things develop in the future.
But i'm still wondering if we are the only ones facing the described issues?
Regards
Carmen0 -
Hello Carla, we will continue to keep this issue under review. One proposal is to use the current behaviour by default, but if we come up against a permissions issue like in this case, then to fail over to a secondary storage location for these temp files. We're still considering things though so no final answer just yet. I just want you to know that we have a relatively open mind on this problem and how to solve it. 0 -
Out of interest, do you have BarTender installed on the same computer or is this a Seagull printer driver only installation? 0 -
Legacy Poster
★ BarTender Hero ★
Hi Ian
Can you please tell me if I can delete the content on c:\programdata\seagul\drivers\temp. I have 1.6gb in there of .tmp files
Regards
Ricardo
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Yes you can. I would imagine that this folder is filled with driver dump files that are created when the driver crashes for some reason. However, if you're using an old driver I would urge you to install the latest (v7.3.3) instead as it fixes a number of issues that you might well be experiencing. The surest way of performing the upgrade would be to do a full removal using the Seagull DriverWizard, reboot, and then install of the new driver. You can download the latest Seagull drivers from the below link:
http://www.bartenderbarcodesoftware.com/drivers/windows-printer-drivers-download.aspx
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