The large amount of printers are missing

For a few days I’ve found that printers that have been published in Active Directory (from our 2008 R2 printer server) were not appearing in the directory or find printers tabs (see above). With about 120 printers deployed and only 5 showing up there had to be something wrong.

As it turns out the Printer Service was starting before the Server service which was causing a whole load of Errors in event log with error Event 315, PrintService being logged.

The printer spooler failed to share printer <printer name> with shared resource name <printer share name> Error 2114. The printer cannot be used by others on the network.

The fix in this case was to restart the Server service (and if the printers do not appear for a few minutes in directory restart the Printer Spooler service as well).

The reasoning behind this is the server service was starting up after the printer spooler service; because of this the printer service was trying to share out the printers and couldn’t (because the server service needs to be running to do this). A simple reboot of the whole server wouldn’t fix this as the same could just happen again where the services start up in the wrong order.

More details can be seen in the screen shots below.

VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Thumbs up if this article helped you 🙂
Rating: +6 (from 6 votes)
Network Deployed Printers are not appearing in Directory, 100% based on 6 ratings

2 Responses to Network Deployed Printers are not appearing in Directory

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *