Printers Not Appearing In Active Directory When Published
So Printers are being added but they aren’t appearing in AD even when you tick the box in the sharing tab “List in the Directory” they still do not appear.
Of note is when you add a new printer into your printer list the local events will show an Event ID 9 (System Event Log). What should happen when its added to AD is you see an Event ID 36, In my case I didn’t see this event at all.
Googling around I noticed that the fix most people were going for is to reboot the server, in my case fortunately that is a primary file server in one of my larger sites so was not an option. The issue is actually stemming from the good ol’ Print Spooler Service; all you need to do is restart that service and all those printers that you added and haven’t appeared will now all be there. Event ID 36 will also appear in logs if you are doing this remote and can’t actually see the list for whatever reason. The problem seems to just happen over time as after a print spooler service restart i can still add printers and they update straight away but if i leave the server up for a lengthy period of time (Days/Weeks) i notice i have to restart the service, im not sure if this is by design or one of MS little ‘quirks’ but its a hacky solution to an unfixable problem from what i found.