Access Denied to printers

[stevenriz]

All of a sudden about half of the network clients' printers have Access denied beside their network printer objects in Start-Settings-Printers. When I look on the NT server, the printers all have Everyone in the Permissions window with Print access. I cannot for the life of me figure this one out. I might try removing and recreating one of the client's user accounts and see what happens. Any back door tricks up someone's sleeve? Thanks.
Steve

 

[epohl]

If is there any kind of error message being generated in event viewer on the print server? I would try rebooting the print server (if that is possible).

 

[stevenriz]

Hi. Thanks for the reply. I have not looked in the event viewer to much extent. Like I wrote, about half the clients are fine and mostly what I see are regular print jobs going through the event viewer. All the printers do have NICs in them and have all been restarted to no avail. Maybe restart the NT server?? It's bad enough I needed to implement a reboot schedule for the NT servers but maybe that's the only choice I have.
Thanks again for the reply.
steve

 

[epohl]

I guess I really should ask how you have this setup. Are all printers configured on 1 NT server? Do you have multiple domains? Also are you using any third party software like HP Jetadmin? Also what OS are the clients using?

 

[stevenriz]

We have one Domain. All print servers have an IP address addressed to them. Jetadmin is used to assign the IP address to the printer although not all servers are jetdirect cards. Some are Xerox cards but they work just the same. Once the printer is setup on the NT 4.0SP6a server, we add them to the clients which are all Win2kProSP2. On the client, we add a printer, brownse the network, choose the NT server and the printers pop up. We just select them and they get installed. Some clients show access denied and others are fine. All permissions look good. I just hate having to restart the entire server every time a little glitch occurs.

 

[epohl]

I am assuming all client machines are added to the domain and using a domain account (not a local user account) to log on to the machine. You might want to check licensing on the server and make sure there are not a limited number of concurrent connections set.

 

[WMSTECH]

This problem has probably been resolved, but I'd like to weigh in with a similar experience. We have nine printers served by NT4 server, and a couple of weeks ago they began to stop accepting jobs. Salient points:

-Windows said "...problem connecting to the printer due to an unknown system error." (Thanks!!) Copying from command line gave Access Denied.

-System log on server showed successful jobs, just 0 bytes in length. Jobs actually never left client queues, though printer was sometimes notified and started warming up.

-Restarting, reinstalling printers, etc., allowed one or two documents to print before problem returned.

-Tried several things, guided by various articles: Made sure up to SP6a; opened up permissions; reduced number of printers; removed JetAdmin on advice of possible conflict with spooler.

In the process, I came across MSKB article Q174844, on corrupt spool files. It recommended deleting .SPL and .SHD files. I found a large mass of .SPL files and deleted them. When spooler service restarted, problem was gone. Therefore, this may be one of the first things to try in this kind of situation.

 

[polymath5]

Very nice of you to post this helpful message. Yep, the spool folder is one of the first places to check when print servers stop printing. Stop the spooler, delete the files, restart the spooler.