[THIN] Re: Printers disappearing and sometimes coming back

We use Tricerat’s Screwdrivers. Upon installation 98% of all printing issues went away. Massive improvement. Citrix printing = not so good.

 

* My name is Chris Grecsek and I approve this message.

 

 

 

PS - …sorry got a little carried away with all these political ads on TV these days! ;)

 

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chris grecsek | centered networks | t:415-294-7776 | m:415-420-3397 | chris@centerednetworks.com

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From: thin-bounce@freelists.org [mailto:thin-bounce@freelists.org] On Behalf Of George Wasgatt
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2008 8:49 AM
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] Re: Printers disappearing and sometimes coming back

 

 

There were no spooler issues, no event bad log entries and the applications were told to start without waiting for the printers to be created – thanks for the tips.  However, the problem turned out to be that the IE Published Application was starting up in a separate ICA session.  All of the other apps were staring in the same ICA session but for some unknown reason the IE session was starting its own ICA session.  This duplicated all of the users printers on the server and somehow made the first set of printers not available to applications using the other ICA session.

 

I couldn’t see anything in the published application that would have forced it to go to a separate ICA session so I deleted the published application and recreated it.  The problem went away.  All of the applications now start in the same ICA session.
 

 

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From: thin-bounce@freelists.org on behalf of George Wasgatt
Sent: Thu 18/09/2008 1:32 AM
To: thin@freelists.org
Subject: [THIN] Printers disappearing and sometimes coming back

I’m trying to add new servers to my farm but each time I build a new server people using that server report that their auto created printers disappear and come back again later.  I do not have this problem on existing servers and I am building the new servers with the same service packs & patches as the existing servers. The auto created printers are actually still there on the server, it’s just that the running published applications lose contact with them for a while.  The only common thread we can find is that the printers disappear only after the user start up a published application of IE6.  Here’s the sequence of events:

 

User starts Citrix Program Neighborhood (V9, V10, V11 - all tested)

User start Outlook – printers are there & can be printed to

User starts IE published application – printers are there & can be printed to

User clicks back to Outlook Window – printers are gone

User clicks back to IE Windows – printers are there, sometimes later the printer reappears, restart the published app helps too

 

Environment: Windows 2003 SP1, Citrix 4.0 Enterprise Rollup 1, one farm all servers configured with the same set of published applications

 

The new servers are either HP BL460c blade servers or VMWare ESX servers.  I tried patching the servers to Windows 2003 SP2 & all avalbie patches and bringing Citrix up to Rollup 5 but the problem persists.