Ideas for clearing spools from remote machines.

Hi guys,

Recently, I re organised the way we install/manage printers at work.

Before we just used to go around each machine and manually install printers, I know right. Now I have print management set up on one of our servers and have the printers installed through GPO preferences (Installed as Local Printers with ports set to printer shares).

Yesterday I had a few pupils saying they couldn’t print to the classroom printer. Upon inspection of the 3 PCs (of the 24 in the classroom) the printer was “Offline: 3 documents in queue”. Each of the 3 PCs had different documents stuck in the queue. We have the PCs locked down so the kids cant even check to “See what’s printing”.

First off, in my head, these should be going to the server, which is what I have them set up as on the server anyway. So, I log in as admin, stop the spool, delete the contents of the PRINTER folder and start the service again. Reboot, done.

Now, I am thinking of doing one of a few things to make this a little easier for me.

1. I was thinking I create a user account that the pupils could log on with. At logon, a script runs to stop spool, delete PRINTER contents and start spool, then does a reboot.

2. Create some powershell script that I can tell which classroom has issues with printing and do a remote restart service + reboot of selected machines.

My issues with 2. is that I would have to make sure the pupil has saved their work and logged off for me to do what I need to do… If I went with 1. then at least I know the pupil has saved their work and logged off.

Has anyone implemented anything like this in their environment? Is there a better way around this? Am I talking absolute rubbish?

Cheers guys