Printers/Spooler

[GRitchie]

Morning,

For some reason, I'm frequently being presented with issues where people can't print. It shows as 'server offline' on the printers, but the spooler is running.

Contrary to that, I've had a few where the spooler has completely stopped itself...

 

Quite vague, but if anyone has any ideas?

[fredbayker]

I presume they're shared printers (?), can you print from the print server?

What does print management tell you?

[sted]

try disabling snmp on the servers print driver settings ive had that cause printers to report as offline even though i could ping them and get to their web page

[GRitchie]

Can print from the server, rest of the network is fine, it's just random ones but it's happening frequently.

Not checked the print management tool on the clients, but it just was giving an error code (didn't take note of it this time)

[cogrady84]

Started experiencing this myself yesterday, ~6 clients yesterday with Server Offline message on our pCounter print queues. Not sure if this is related to a recent windows client/server update? Advised by our support providers to hard reset all clients and mfp's, will see what effect this has today...

[GRitchie]

This is kind of what I was hoping it was, an update of some kind. But I'm not sure. Seems too random and intermittent to be that?

[themightymrp]

I used to have this problem frequently but resolved it by setting all printer drivers to run in Isolation mode on the client machines. I've not had it now for a few years

[cogrady84]

I used to have this problem frequently but resolved it by setting all printer drivers to run in Isolation mode on the client machines. I've not had it now for a few years

 

According to Google, print drivers run in isolation mode by default. Could you elaborate?

 

EDIT: Default in Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 anyway (https://helgeklein.com/blog/2009/04/printer-driver-isolation-in-windows-7-and-server-2008-r2/)

[themightymrp]

They do yes.... in a way. They run isolated by default but Windows still groups them under one single process. If you open the print management console on a machine and expand the drivers folder, you will see them all listed as "shared". You can force each driver to load into its own separate process (which appears in task manager as PrintIsolationHost.exe) by changing the mode to Isolated. As a matter of course now, I just highlight all of the drivers and set them to isolated. It may sound a bit overkill but I haven't had a spooler crash for a long time

[cogrady84]

No problems reported today... slightly weird

 

Oh well

[GRitchie]

I had one before. Printers appearing faint in the print dialogue box, and then when trying to connect to another I got told the print spooler wasn't running.

However... It was...

 

http://awscdn.cdngeek.net/images/smilies/confused.pnghttp://awscdn.cdngeek.net/images/smilies/confused.pnghttp://awscdn.cdngeek.net/images/smilies/confused.png