Too Many Printer Redirection Ports on Windows 2008 R2

printingrdpwindows-server-2008-r2

We have a Windows 2008 R2 server with Printer Redirection, that clients connect to via Remote Desktop/Terminal Services. When there are a lot of users logged in to the server simultaneously, many of them can't see or print to their local (client) printers.

We have enabled local group policy "Redirect only the default client printer" on both computer and user level, and the user can only "see" his or her default client printer. But, every user still gets a redirection port to every local printer (in the Registry).

With 100 simultaneous users, this translates to more than 600 redirected, active ports.

How can we make Windows only allocate printer redirection ports to the default printers? (Why is this even a problem, why is 600 printer ports such a huge problem for Windows?) Would more RAM mitigate the problem?

(We have installed the hotfix and tried the Fix It application, but the problem doesn't seem to be due to inactive ports, but too many active ones.)

Update: The server is running inside VMWare.

Best Answer

What drivers are you using? Easy Print? If you're not, or if the client doesn't support that, you're going to have to install the print driver on your server. Yes, for each of your 100 users.

Related Solutions

Security – windows 2008 R2 TS printer security – can’t take owership

Windows normally will not users to change ownership of any object to anything other than Administrators (or themselves if they have the take ownership permission on the object), unless they are an Administrator or they have some special Windows User Rights (which you should not confer).

I would speculate that the seven year old x86 version of subinacl.exe is not working correctly with the security token in the elevated process.

A couple of suggestions:

Try using the updated version of subinacl, 5.2.3790.1180, available at:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=e8ba3e56-d8fe-4a91-93cf-ed6985e3927b

Try using the free SetAcl.exe utility. This is the swiss-army kitchen sink of permissions management tools, and includes an x64 build. This is an active project and includes many features lacking in the Microsoft utilities.

http://helgeklein.com/setacl/

Documentation:

http://helgeklein.com/setacl/documentation/command-line-version-setacl-exe/
http://helgeklein.com/setacl/examples/managing-printer-service-and-share-permissions-with-setacl-exe/

Example usage:

setacl -on "Printer Name" -ot prn -actn setowner -ownr n:domainNetbiosName\userName

Printer spooler spoolsv.exe crashes after user logon

My bet would be one of the redirected printers using an incompatible, out-of-date or just plain malformed driver. Try removing the all client's printers, then adding them back one by one, until you figure out which printer driver's causing the problem, then update or remove the problem driver.

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