Viewing installed network printers on a remote Win7 Ent. remotely.

[FullTilt151]

Just joined the forum, so I have this is the correct subforum for my question. Here goes.

Back during the XP days, in a domain setting, you could browse to a remote computer and view what printers were installed on that machine, local printers via usb/etc AND printers who's queue reside on a print server.

I cannot do that in a Windows 7 environment. Win7 clients, Win 2008 R2 print server.

Turned off the firewall on the clients and server.
Put test machines and print server in an OU that doesn't get any Group Policy.
Turned on Network Discovery
Turned on file/print sharing
Turned on public folder sharing
(there's no antivirus, 3rd party firewall, etc in place).

On my test machine, I installed a printer. \\printserver\testprinter

On my work machine I browsed to my test machine by opening Windows Explorer: \\testmachine
Click on 'View remote printer'
I can see the default local printers (Fax, Microsoft XPS Doc Writer, etc) but I do NOT see the printer I installed who's queue is on the print server.

I've been googling and testing this all day. Is there something I'm missing here?

Cheers!

 

[Ztruker]

What does net view \\testmachine from a Command Prompt show you?

 

[FullTilt151]

It shows nothing.


Share name Type Used as Comment

------------------------------------
Users Disk
The command completed successfully.

 

[Ztruker]

Did you share the printer on the server? I don't believe just installing it makes it available for sharing.

Have you seen this? Setting Up a Windows Server 2008 Print Server

 

[Bryansix]

ZTrucker,

The OP never mentioned trying to share the printer.

The only thing I can think of that might be causing this is that the remote registry service is not running.

 

[iancat]

You can't view the remote printers do to group policy. You can fix this through your group policy manager or as I prefer to do it, add the following registry key to the target machine and restart the print spooler after the key is added.


[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\Printers]
"RegisterSpoolerRemoteRpcEndPoint"=dword:00000001

If you want to do this remotely make sure to turn the target PCs remote registry on.