Printers Off-Line

[speckled]

I have got a very annoying issue at the moment, basically the printers are displayed as off-line to the users, I restart the spooler service and it resolves the issue. This can happen several times a day or nothing for a week and then again several times a day. I can print to the printer added locally or from the print server when they are displayed as off-line but nothing sent to the server from users print.

I have disabled SNMP, and added a SNMPlegacy reg key that are the most commonly mentioned fixes but nothing is having any affect, I am also using the latest drivers for the devices available, anyone had this issue before? I am running server 2012 R2 and windows 7 workstations.

[andydis]

does it happen on all computers?

do you have any managed print software (papercut ?)

how much RAM is in the pc's / server?

[speckled]

Yes it happens on all clients, we do have pcounter RAM amount varies, from 4Gb to 32Gb on clients and the print server is a VM with 16Gb I have monitored the RAM usage on both the server and clients and neither are approaching any high usage at the time of stopping, also no errors are logged on the server or client at the time of going off-line.

[andydis]

ok the reason i ask about RAM is in my experience when you have low RAM the first thing to stop working is the print spooler,

next thing i would try is try one PC / user to print directly to the printer on its IP and not the pcounter port , this will rule out pcounter crashing the spooler

[Ertech]

is they any other local printers connected to the clients? That might be causing the issue?

[speckled]

I am able to print to the printer locally and from the print server when they are displayed as off-line, we only have 14 devices, all deployed via GPO

[Fazza]

Had this issue ever since Windows 8. We did find an explanation on microsoft.com which basically said it was a known issue with no known fix and went on to say there were no plans on finding a fix!

 

For us, it only happens on laptops and it only happens after they have taken their laptop home, connected to their home wireless and then come back to school. We got a few staff to not take their laptops home for a few days who randomly experience the issue and it never happened whilst doing this.

 

We have a 'Fix Printers Offline' shortcut on the desktop that runs a script to stop and start the spooler which (as other people have reported) resolves this silly issue.

[SHimmer45]

i had something similar where i disabled SNMP on the printer and my 2008r2 printer server insisted the print Q was offline, i believe the print Q default communication is SNMP apparently, enabled SNMP and the Q's woke up.

i didnt investigate the issue further as didnt have time at the time

[Fazza]

I am also using the latest drivers for the devices available

 

Out of interest, what devices do you have? We have HP Laser Printers so would be interested to see if you have the same make or different?

[speckled]

We have Konica Minolta C35P and C285e devices.

[Fazza]

We have Konica Minolta C35P and C285e devices.

 

As we have HP printers then that kind of rules out a drivers issue! Maybe. Possibly. No idea! It's been going on so long now!