Friday, February 29, 2008

Printers Dissapearing From Active Directory

Whilst looking through issues for another printing problem closely related I came across an old issue I had that I thought best I put up here for safe keeping as I’m sure it will happen to me or someone else again.
Printers in the Active Directory printer list can sometimes just disappear for no reason at all; this is actually due to a bigger problem in your network. In my case it was one site where AD was not replicating properly and as such it couldn’t contact the main print server and just deleted all the printers. This is known as Printer Pruning, I’ve got the official MS article HERE


The quick and easy fix for this is just to go into the printers sharing tab, un-tick the List in the Directory option, hit apply and re-tick it. If that doesn’t work un-tick, restart spooler, tick again and restart spooler to be 100% sure it’s applying.
Please note this is exposing a bigger issue where AD is not communicating properly and should be investigated straight away (now that your printers are working and your users aren’t screaming at you anymore because they can’t print their tenders). You should be seeing logs reporting problems in replication and fix them as soon as possible.


Posted by admin in • Active Directory (AD)
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