Maxfu

We have three 2003 servers each hosting about 5 printers. All of the printers are shared and selected to list in the directory. Everything has been fine until a few days ago. Now when a user attempts to add a network printer and they utilize the "find now" option, no shared printers appear in the list. There are no errors or message that no printers could be found. They work around here has been to deselect the "list in directory" option, apply it and then add it back. This will bring the printer back to showing in the directory but it is usually just a day before the problem resurfaces. We do not have our network printers created as objects in Active Directory. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

TheMatt

Hi, and welcome to TSF!

I don't know the answer right away, so I will try to troubleshoot it.

First, obtain the IP of one or a couple printers. When the printers disappear from the directory, see if you can ping them.

zakatak144

Has anyone ever found out anything about this? I have had the same problem with my network, but we have about 75 printer shares connected to our server. I can say that yes these printers' IP addresses can be pinged and printing still works on computer that have previously connected to one of these printers before the printer went missing in the directory. I am stumped for options on how to fix this since i have so many printers and do not have time to uncheck and check these boxes every day. Has anyone got any insight? The server this is happening to runs Server 2003.

Thanks for anyones help in advance.

Zach

TheMatt

Have you re-added any of the printers to the AD? If so, do the same printers disappear again or is it random printers at different times?

Could you provide more information about the domain you are on (DCs, BDCs, printers & where they are connected, problematic workstations, etc.).

zakatak144

Thank you so much for your quick response to my post but i did figure out the issue before you responded. I went into our domain controller group policy in AD, since this particular print server is also a DC. I then navigated to Computer Configuration>Administrative Templates>Printers. Here i found that none of these settings were configured for our domain controllers. There I made these settings:

Allow printers to be published: Enabled
Allow pruning of published printers: Disabled
Check published state: Enabled, every 1 hour
Directory pruning interval: Disabled
Directory pruning priority: Disabled
Directory pruning retry: Disabled
Log directory pruning retry events: Disabled
Printer browsing: Enabled
Prune printers that are not automatically republished: Disabled
Allow print spooler to accept client connections: Enabled

Every other setting is set to Not configured. This combination of settings allows the print server to to check for active printers every hour, and publish those active printers in the directory. Plus, with the other settings, the print server won't delete any printers from the directory even if they haven't reported in a while. Everything is working good now. Thanks anyway.

TheMatt

Printer pruning was what I was thinking needed to be disabled. That is probably what was the main cause of the disappearing printers. Glad you got it fixed.