Blocking Printer Search

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

One odd thing I've noticed with our classroom build of Win 11 over Win 10, is that when I open something like Notepad and try and print, it shows mapped printers, but also seemingly all other printers it can find on the network. This doesn't seem to be the printers on the print server, this looks like they've been found via a broadcast.

 

Anyone know if there's a group policy setting or something to prevent this? Inevitably, a student's going to add one and print rubbish to it, and if printing direct I'm not sure that will be easily traced.

 

Thanks

[3s-gtech]

I had this all the way back to Windows 7.

 

The key was to disable the services on the printers themselves, that actually broadcast. That wasn't needed in our setup - disabled everything but printing via port 9100 Raw and the web interface on each one.

[PotNoodleTech]

Used to be a setting on each printer share on the print server?  Not sure if it still is on the newest O/S's

 

[Gongalong]

Thanks, I'll try turning that off and see if it helps. The printers are appearing in the list almost as if it is finding them directly i.e. not via the server, because they appear with their machine names, but then clicking on them seems to add them whcih also suggests it's print server related to be able to pull the driver. This only seemed to be in Notepad, but I didn't test with a lot of apps. Word seemed to be behaving sensibly, and only showing mapped printers.