Offline printer is NOT showing as being offline in Win10

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Win10 Enterprise 1803

This is a really odd issue one of our clients is having trouble with and everything I’ve found online is basically a reverse of the problem, where printers go offline and will not come back online. In this case, their networked printers from a print server go offline when they switch networks, but Windows 10 does not show the printer as being offline and it behaves as if the printer is still online.

Easiest way to explain it – a GP logon script adds printers to a laptop. User is fine at the office. User takes the laptop home, connects to their WiFi on a network completely separate from the work network (obviously), but the office printers show up as being online in File Explorer and in MS Office and Adobe Acrobat.

They do have a VPN client but it is not connected at the time on the secondary network.

I cannot figure out what is holding the printer connection hostage to where it is behaving like it’s online.

Does anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

I think it’s a GP issue but our client claims they’ve reproduced the issue on a laptop with the printers mapped manually and no GP applied. I have not been able to reproduce this issue myself.

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Well. This’ll depend on how smart the printer driver is and how it’s connected… back in the old days I used to see a bunch of these, and as everyone knows printer online/offline state detection still isn’t universally reliable even if the problem is usually in the other direction…

So what does it mean that it “behaves as if the printer is still online” anyway?

Piles of paper accumulating in the output tray back at the office?  Probably someone accidentally turned on cloud-based printing… possible security issue. Yes, this is possible, some versions of certain inkjet drivers were rather… aggressively helpful…

 

Do print jobs go into the queue, do they also leave the queue and just vanish, do they accumulate in a directory somewhere, or do they stay in the queue until some transmission job times out… after waiting an hour for any response from the printer?

 

There was one “solution” that faked a local port but then had its own logic for sending jobs to a server, which was useful for certain specialty printers with less than optimal drivers.

Then there was the dumb “raw socket” network printer driver that just sent data but didn’t actually have a return channel for status…

Then there’s the chance that the user forgot to mention that they have a similar printer at home, and the driver tries to be smart but doesn’t check for unique identifiers – as long as it’s the same model or close enough…

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So what does it mean that it “behaves as if the printer is still online” anyway?
Windows and its applications do not show the printer as “Offline”. File Explorer shows it as “Connected”.
Do print jobs go into the queue, do they also leave the queue and just vanish, do they accumulate in a directory somewhere, or do they stay in the queue until some transmission job times out… after waiting an hour for any response from the printer?
If someone tries to print to one of the printers, there’s an error message (which varies based on the application; Word has a different error than Excel which is different than Outlook and also Adobe Acrobat). Nothing actually goes into the printer’s queue.
There was one “solution” that faked a local port but then had its own logic for sending jobs to a server, which was useful for certain specialty printers with less than optimal drivers.
I did see that workaround, but in this case it wouldn’t work. Printers are shared from a print server.
In this case, yes, there is a duplicate printer for some of the users at home, but the home printer is named differently than the office printer. The office printer (and several other office printers which are mapped) are the ones exhibiting this behavior.
I have requested Wireshark trace logs both on network and off to see what the network is doing, as I feel that will probably shed some light on the actual culprit.

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zero2dash wrote:

 If someone tries to print to one of the printers, there’s an error message (which varies based on the application; Word has a different error than Excel which is different than Outlook and also Adobe Acrobat). Nothing actually goes into the printer’s queue.

And that happens right away? Hm, fairly often in these cases it’s a printer driver error.

There’s that little point about where the rendering job runs – server or client side. Client side, first the driver does the page rendering and then sends all that to server. Server side, well…

zero2dash wrote:

In this case, yes, there is a duplicate printer for some of the users at home, but the home printer is named differently than the office printer. The office printer (and several other office printers which are mapped) are the ones exhibiting this behavior.

Ah, so this is multiple printers, multiple users, multiple computers, … same or identically configured server? Are all the printers using the same driver?

How the printer is named actually has nothing to do with this and doesn’t exclude anything, because the printer name doesn’t directly affect where the data goes. (There are situations where I like to have multiple names for the same printer, on purpose. You can even use multiple driver versions in parallel for the same physical printer that way.)

 

What I’d expect to find is that the driver is sort of dumb and doesn’t check for destination online status correctly. Might be using an outdated API that doesn’t work on W10 or something… some people are always surprised at how old the printer drivers may be in some networks… well, backwards compatibility is a big thing with some printer manufacturers.

(As an aside, I “coincidentally” had to turn on printer driver isolation on some old print servers to keep things working, just the same day they’d had the first Windows 10 clients show up on the site… and had to update some drivers because they were older than driver isolation. But in that case I did get error events on the server.)

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