Printing Stinks: Today the pager was slammed down on my desk, followed promptly by “beep beep beep beep” as it goes off (yep, I got the pager during the week of xmas) and the prior week I was on PTO. So in somewhat of a haze and attempting to catch up, I went ahead and dialed into the triage call. Here was the issue: several users in Mumbai were having difficulty printing via an application hosted on a XenApp farm. In this scenario, there was only one server hosting the application.

Inital thoughts: 

  Could it be the Citrix printing services experiencing the issues?

  Could it be the local print spooler on the server?

  Could it be the remote server hosting the print queue?

Resolution:

  Printing locally via a TCP queue was successful (test page printed fine, user confirmed).

  When the user disconnected from their session and reconnected, you could see printer redirection  working appropriately as they were auto created on the server and visually confirmed. But when the users/customers attempted to print, no print made it to the printer. Even know you could see some action in the queue.

  Restarted both printer services (Citrix/local spooler) and still no successful prints.

  Server admin ended up bouncing the spooler on the server hosting the print queue for the users.

Thoughts:

As a Citrix admin, I’ve always been frustrated at this scenario. No real alerts coming through either via Citrix relevant alerts or through MOM. When the alert came through, it was too late and the users were ultimately the ones who suffered.  Even though the entire issue only lasted about an hour.