Strange Printer Issue

[dave.81]

Well today we return from half term to a barage of complaints that the printers are not working. Fine check the print server all seems fine and prints are going through, must just be teachers forgetting how to use the system during a week off.

Only to receive more and more complaints, log on as a test user and go to print, odd it's set to manual double sided print. Log onto another pc the same, another room the same, another building the same.

Check the print server and all printers are set to double sided, have no reset all the printers but the pc's are still showing the same error.

Anyone know why this might have happened all on it's own, or how to get them all back to single sided printing quickly and easily?

[contink]

Are these HP printers by any chance?

I've not seen that particular issue straight off the bat but at a guess somehow someone has been able to set the printer defaults via the Properties > Advanced tab > Printing Defaults

If you reset those to use the normal settings and then try logging off and logging back on again (assuming of course you handle printer using a login script - and that it deletes printers and then re-adds them).

That may solve it... I can think of no reason for this to happen though without user intervention..

[dave.81]

Yes they are all HP ones, and we did have a stage at the end of the half term of pupils printing double side, more than one page per sheet.

I have reset all the settings on the server but when users logon it's still defaulting back to the old setting. And yes we are using a script to delete and install printers.

IT appears that even though our script is set to delete and reinstall the printers that the settings are not being reloaded off the server each time, ie all printers set to A4 but are defaulting to letter after logon. Guessing it's being stored in their profiles somewhere?

[contink]

Yes they are all HP ones, and we did have a stage at the end of the half term of pupils printing double side, more than one page per sheet.

I have reset all the settings on the server but when users logon it's still defaulting back to the old setting. And yes we are using a script to delete and install printers.

I'm wondering if the server you've accessed it from is actually the key owner (ie: the unit it's all shared from). I'd check that...

If it still doesn't work I'd try uninstalling the driver and reinstalling, checking the defaults and then re-share under a different sharename. You'll need to edit the login script to point to the new printer but hopefully that'll solve it.

My guess though is that somehow someone has managed to reset or edit the default profile somewhere...

IT appears that even though our script is set to delete and reinstall the printers that the settings are not being reloaded off the server each time, ie all printers set to A4 but are defaulting to letter after logon. Guessing it's being stored in their profiles somewhere?

Ah.. the "letter" issue is one I see at home with a K5400... It's network shared direct to my machine (not through a server)... For some reason my machine starts with letter initially but a laptop also direct connected is seeing it as A4 from the get-go... Still trying to track that issue down.

[bossman]

We too have seen strange issues with HP printers in the fact that the printer is not collating the pages properly i.e. if you have 10 pages to print from front to back then it prints page 10 first then page 1 then 9 and then 2 etc etc.
All we can think of is the printer drivers have been corrupted in some way as the only solution we have found to date is to de-allocate the printer from the OU and then change the driver to any other in the printer properties on the server, delete the offending drivers from the server then re-install the drivers and re-allocate out to OU.
We thought it might be something to do with RMCC3 but unfortunately not as there has been recordings of it happening on vanilla platforms.
I have been told that older drivers tend to work better but don't have any real old drivers to use, it has happened mainly on latest printers 4250ns but recently on 2015n and 1320 local printer attached to my workstation.

[dave.81]

Thanks contink, think i'll re-install under a new share and see if that fixes everything