Printers not getting removed from the client when deselected in FOG web interface

[Sebastian-Roth]

Following up this post in the forums. I am able to replicate this issue on a Windows 7 32 bit system. I am fairly sure this applies to 64 bit version as well.

Adding debug statements to the code I found that WindowsPrinterManager.GetPrinters() does not return a list of currently installed printers as we would expect.

To me this seems to be caused by FOGService running as local system account whereas the printers/printer connections are obviously only visible in the user context. Try running the following VBscript as normal user (double click or wscript.exe C:\path\to\printer.vbs from cmd.exe) and under local system privileges (this is done using PsExec.exe -i -s cmd.exe /C wscript.exe C:\path\to\printer.vbs, see here):

Set objNetwork = CreateObject("Wscript.Network")

Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\.\root\cimv2")
Set colPrinters = objWMIService.ExecQuery ("SELECT* FROM Win32_Printer")

For Each objPrinter In colPrinters
WScript.Echo objPrinter.Name & vbCrLf
Next

WScript.Echo "done"

Running it as user I get both local printers and the network printer configured by the FOG client. But as local system account I only get the local printers.

[Sebastian-Roth]

There are several hints on the net that others have similar problems, e.g. here and here.

Right now I am looking into reading the printer information directly from the registry. Looks as if this could be the way to go.

[Sebastian-Roth]

Alright, here is a first test DLL which reads printer information from the registry instead of using WMI calls. This works great on my test VM - win7 32 bit.

• download and extract Modules.dll.zip
• run cmd.exe as administrator

net stop fogservice
rename "C:\Program Files\FOG\Modules.dll" Modules_orig.dll
cd C:\path\to\extracted\modules\file
move Modules.dll "C:\Program Files\FOG\"

• make sure you have a network printer configured for this client
• reboot your client, login and check the FOG client log
• see if the printer comes up in Control Panel -> Devices and Printers
• de-select printer from that client in the FOG web GUI
• check FOG client log and Control Panel

[Sebastian-Roth]

As we don't have many people using the new fog-client release 0.11.17 including that change we shall wait a little bit more to see what happens.