Printers dropping off

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In our environment most of our users connect to an RDS host sever (Server 2012) then open AX. We've had this occasional issue where printers seem to drop off AX.

i.e User tries to print invoice but the printers are now missing from the print dialog box. If you check the RDS host the printers are still there.

The only solution we've come up with is to remove the printer(s) from the RDS host then add them back again. This seems to refresh the available printers in AX.

Has anyone come across this before or know of a solution? It can be quite frustrating and time consuming having to remove and re-add 5 or 10 printers.

Thanks

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Brandon Wiese 17,788 on at

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RE: Printers dropping off

I run an RDS cluster of 10 servers with about 400 users on AX 2012, and I see printers disappear all the time. It is incredibly frustrating and quite common.

At first I didn't believe the complaints, so I wrote a user login powershell script to record the printers at every user login. I originally suspected that perhaps a driver was missing from one of the individual RDS machines, and without a driver the printer should error, but that turned out not to be the case. I can even show that a user will have all of their printers in the morning, and when they disconnect for lunch and reconnect later to the SAME host (which also causes a printer re-mapping from the client to the RDS host server), some printers are gone.

I tried to augment my login script to automatically map printers, and I've discovered that users are sometimes unable to map a particular printer from our print server (even though the driver is installed). We have not been able to determine a reason for this, as the error messages are worthless, as expected.

I do have a powershell script published to RemoteApp that deletes and re-adds all printers one at a time, and this sometimes clears up strange problems.

Obviously with packing slip and invoice posting you would never want to use a redirected printer, since its name would change at every login, and the user would suffer with "printer settings are invalid" errors regularly.

I guess I'm just confirming that you're not alone with this issue.

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RE: Printers dropping off

Thanks Vilmos. Looks like I'll open a ticket for this one.

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Vilmos Kintera 46,149 on at

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RE: Printers dropping off

Another solution is installing the printers on each AX AOS instance where users can connect or where you would be running a batch, and ticking the printer sharing in the AX server configuration utility.

It is not a good solution though since printer drivers could be unreliable or cause a CPU exhaustion on the print spooler.

We have not faced this issue, it is working perfectly fine on the RDS host with session-based desktop deployment.

You might be better off to just open a ticket with Microsoft and let them troubleshoot the problem.

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