Printers disappearing in Active Directory

[Housing]

Has anyone come across this problem where all of your network printers that a listed in AD have disappeared?

When a user tries to find a network printer, no printers are available on the network. Had to stop & start all spooler services on multiple DC's before they started appearing again in AD.

The only change that was made before this started happening was that scavenging in DNS was enabled. I want to know if this is related to the above problem and is there a fix for this issue?

Thanks

 

[sluice]

Did you have the printers in their own OU? Sounds like somebody with admin privileges deleted it. Have you checked on Technet/Google for this problem?

 

[Housing]

No one with admin priviledges deleted anything. If this was the case why are they still there if the spooler service was restarted? I am still looking into Technet & Google.

The printers are not in there own OU?

 

[Tekmazter]

This happened to us at my present company. I cannot remember what exactly caused this but it has to do with replication between sites and domain controllers. I would double-check everything in Sites and Services. I will ask the guy's at the office tmorrow to see what else we did to fix this. I think in the end it was one of those anonmolies that eventually went a way as we cleaned up site connectors. I will double check however and try to post back.

 

[Housing]

What we have found out is that one of our our WAN links was down for longer than 24 hours and printer pruning was initiated on our Dc's hence losing all the printers in AD.

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 246906 explains all about the problem.

You can set the directory pruning interval at the domain level to never or disable allow pruning of published printers.

So far all appears to be ok.

Housing