Deploying network ticket printers via Windows Group Policy

Nick Reilingh — Sat, 02 Jul 2022 00:42:30 GMT

Current Revision posted to Community Docs Wiki by Nick Reilingh on 7/2/2022 12:42:30 AM

Printer deployment is a vast subject with a multitude of options, but I wanted to point out one particular footgun that can cause issues for box office personnel doing batch printing and similar activities:

When deploying networked ticket printers via Group Policy Preferences, an "action" must be selected for the preference from Create, Update, Replace, and Delete. This action controls how the preference will be applied. What may not be obvious if you are new to Group Policy is that the Replace action is equivalent to a Create action followed by a Delete action which is pre-scheduled for the next policy refresh. This means that every 90 minutes or so (with some random variance) when group policy is applied by the client, your printer will be deleted and immediately recreated by the group policy client.

If Tessitura is actively printing to a printer like in a batch print and the printer gets deleted, its reference to the printer is invalidated and the print will start to error out. This is because the reference to the printer during printing is a code object reference, not a reference by printer name, and when group policy deletes and recreates the printer, it deletes the existing code object and creates a brand new one that only just happens to have the same user-visible name.

So: Don't use the Replace action for ticket printers. Use Create or Update. You can always issue a Delete action preference later to clean up cruft instead of making use of the "Remove this item when it is no longer applied" option, which requires the Replace action.

Tags: printers, group policy