Correct way to stop Print Spooler on Cluster server 1

[edlcsre]

Hi all,

Apologies, I have just landed myself a Cluster to support, and inherited some long standing 'support' calls to try and resolve, and wondered if anyone could offer some advice.

Its about printing. We've got a 2 node Windows 2003 Server Cluster, which is a File Server and an Exchange server. The print spooler and the print server are both set to exist on the File Server, which is fine.

For reasons I've yet to be able to find out, there is a scheduled task on the File Server to stop and restart the spooler service (nothing more fancy than net stop spooler and net start spooler) However, recently this has stopped working, users arrive in the morning and can't print. This has been 'resolved' by setting the print spooler, within the Cluster Administrator to restart. This means that the spooler is working when the users get in, but I've got two questions.

Firstly, is there a way to schedule the stop and restart of the service within the Cluster Administrator itself. I know that setting up shares and so on really needs to be done via the cluster administrator interface, and so wonder whether the fact we're just using task manager to do this is what's causing the problem. I suspect this as the event log shows a cluster error, spooler service failed at the scheduled stop/start time each morning.

However, secondly, the senior manager for the customer wants an explanation as to WHY the problem is happening (despite the fact that its no longer affecting people!) Anyone got any ideas as to what I can tell him! This used to work without any problems in the past apparently, so simply saying its because things aren't being managed via the cluster administrator isn't likely to be enough, although thats what i suspect may be the problem.

Any info or advice much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Chris

 

[AndyPeck]

This may help

cluster.exe is a command line tool that allows you to do all cluster operations, therefore once you know the syntax you can drop it scheduled task.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...tandard/proddocs/en-us/sag_mscsaclstexe_1.asp

Andy

 

[edlcsre]

magic Andy, just the sort of information I was hoping for! Will have a read, but it looks like this should be enough to be able to stop and restart the service using the cluster command, which i think has to be better than just using net stop on the actual node.

thanks again!

 

[edlcsre]

Hi again,

Well, I made the changes, based on the cluster.exe command, and everything stopped and restarted smoothly for a few days (no entries in the event viewer, unlike before)

However, the previous problem, which was that we'd arrive in the office to find the cluster spooler service not running, and, if users had got in early, them calling to say they cannot print) happened again this morning.

I'm trying to get to the bottom of this, because

1)I can't understand why the cluster print spooler service doesn't recover itself, as its set to do, and
2)The print spooler service on the local node itself (eg the one you see if you bring up the services on the local machine) is set to manual, and to 'not recover' on any failure attempts.

On point 2, i wanted to check that this is correct, that the print spooler service is set to manual, and that the Cluster Print Spooler service will be responsible for starting the print spooler.

On point 1, anyone got any ideas what would cause the cluster print spooler to fail in the first place. I've made some changes to the restart job so it now stops the cluster print spooler service, pipes the current state of the service to a text file, clears the spool directory, restarts the cluster print spooler, again pipes the current state of the service to a text file (to make sure it really IS restarting) and then stops. I'm hoping this will prove that the service does re-start ok, but that something else is causing it to stop on certain occasions.

Anyone had a similar problem? any suggestions as to what else could be causing the problem very much appreciated. Will post up a solution once I've got one thats tested for a week and working!!

Many thanks,

Chris

 

[AndyPeck]

I'm guessing you seen these already

** Have you found out why the spooler is restarted each night yet ???

How to set up a clustered print server

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/278455/EN-US/

You experience slow printer performance on a clustered print server in Windows Server 2003 and in Windows 2000 Server

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;822553

How to Troubleshoot Printing Issues on a Windows Server 2003 Cluster

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;302539

 

[edlcsre]

cheers Andy

I'd not seen ther slow printer performance one before, so many thanks for that,

and No, I've not found anyone yet who can tell me why we actually stop the print spooler service in the first place.

One thing I did notice, however, when checking a cluster server for another customer was that for them (and they're not having any problems) the local print spooler service is set to automatic, whereas for this intermittantly working one, its set to manual.

Think its time to try and find some time to read up about clusters a bit more.

Thanks again for the info, very much appreciated, will hopefully be able to post a definitive solution soon.


...or just stop the restarts!!

cheers,

Chris

 

[Tghare]

I have been reading through old posts as I am new to this site and saw this with no resolution. I expect that you have already figured out that the cluster configuration you have inherited was either not well planned or someone made a decision to add services on the cheap. Clustering is a tool intended to harden critical services or to speed up huge, time critical applications. It has been my experience that running different services on each cluster server is not a good idea, when you really need the bandwidth for the critical app that caused your network engineer to choose clustering, the other apps interfere with your ability to troubleshoot what is really happening. Have you split the file and print services from the exchange?