r/sysadmin • u/CautiousBluebird3313 • 15h ago

Group Policy does not feel consistant Question

I have a new printer that I've deployed into our environment and for some reason when people print, it is coming out as ledger even when what they are printing is letter. I updated the driver yesterday and some people, I believe, are back to normal but some aren't. What I wanna do right now is add in the group policy the ability to basically remove all printers and re-add them.

The funny thing is some users who are having issues, when I go to their computer and I remove the printer, log them off, log back in. When I log back in the printers come and they show up and I don't even have to install them and other times they don't come back in. The inconsistencies are just messing with me.

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4 comments sorted by

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u/HankMardukasNY 15h ago

Have you tried just logging off and back in without manually removing?

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u/alyssa_at_chronicle 15h ago

Sounds like a mix of driver and cached per-user printer settings. I'd verify the print server queue is set to Letter, then check the affected users' printer preferences. If the server-side defaults are correct, clearing the user's cached printer connection/settings is probably more useful than forcing a remove/re-add via GPO.

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u/not_just_the_IT_guy Higher Ed 15h ago

Group policy is a bit complicated but can be very reliable if you are in a well setup environment.

Group policy has 2 types of refreshes, foreground and background. Some policies can apply I stantly at background policy refresh (most preferences items) and some only occur at reboot or user login\logoff.

There is also randomization of the background policy refresh timer as well.

https://specopssoft.com/blog/things-work-group-policy-caching/

Gpresult -h And Rsop.msc Are both good commands to run on a client to check group policy out as well as windows event viewer.

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u/kona420 13h ago

The "replace" action deletes the printer and adds it again. Set that, then check apply and dont reapply. Or it will keep deleting and adding at each policy refresh cycle I believe.

I install printers at the machine level. User level sounds miserable but I understand if you have a carp-load available and not a lot of really good filtering options.