Citrix Print Detective
Anyone who has worked with Citrix XenApp (formerly Presentation Server) will know that printers and drivers are a very big part of your farm design and its stability. A print driver that causes instability is a nightmare for Citrix Administrators, now there is a handy tool to help you troubleshoot print driver issues.
The Citrix Print Detective application can be downloaded by clicking the link and is described on the web site as follows.
Print Detective is an information-gathering utility that can be used for troubleshooting problems related to print drivers. It enumerates all drivers from the specified 32-bit Windows computer, including driver-specific information. It can also be used to delete specified print drivers. It also offers logging capabilities and provides a Command Line Interface (CLI).
I can see this being most use for identifying exactly what drivers are installed on your XenApp server. If you’ve not configured your farm(s) to use driver compatibility lists or policies to prevent driver auto install from print servers you can end up with all sorts of drivers installed on your XenApp server. Any of these can cause you stability issues with the print spooler service or even cause a dreaded blue screen of death, nothing like a print driver crashing a server and dumping 50+ Citrix users out of their sessions.
A couple of screenshot of the application can be found below with some details on use, the full instructions on use can be found on the Citrix Print Detective page.
To run the Print Detective software against a remote host , enter the name and click the enumerate button.
Once the drivers are displayed for your local or remote host you can delete a selected driver, (requires administrator privileges)
Now I haven’t used this application in anger myself, as always I’ll keep this in reserve for the next print driver issue in my employers Citrix farm. If anyone has any experience of using this in a real world scenario please feel free to share your experience by leaving a comment or two.
