The project I'm currently working on involves a Windows 2008 (32-bit) failover cluster dedicated to printing. The print management console, introducted with Windows 2003 R2 has an export feature which is supposed to replace the printmig utility. I like the idea of having the possiblity to save multiple sets of drivers/ print queues to a file. It's an eassy way to have a roll-back plan when some new installed driver doesn't works the way it's supposed to be working. Besides the fact that some thirdy party printer drives don't install nicely on the virtual print cluster, there seems to be an issue with the export feature. The good news is that it will be fixed in SP2 of Windows 2008.



I noticed that even with drivers which are provided within Windows 2008, the issue exists. I simply added the HP Laserjet 4 printer driver to the drivers on the cluster:



Which is nicely installed without errors:



But when I want to save the drivers, print queues and ports:



The following error occurs:



When I click the event viewer button, no errors seem to have been logged:



And if I perform a manual export by using the printbrm.exe command line utility I receive the following error:



After using sysinternals process monitor I found out that the export utility is trying to access a share (c$) on the network name "clif01ps". This is actually the name of the printer resource, and because windows 2008 failover clusteirng uses scoped shares, the share isn't available at all at that path.

I opened a call for this at Microsoft who confirmed they could reproduce this issue. A month later a fix was deliverd which solved the problem for us. Microsoft support confirmed the fix will be included with Windows 2008 SP2.

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