I feel like a significant portion of my working life is currently being taken up with fixing things broken by Windows updates. Thanks for that Microsoft.
So the issue seemed relatively simple. The main office printer, a Brother HL-L6300DW monochrome laser printer, had stopped printing double-sided. In fact, if you sent something double-sided, it didn’t print at all. A quick dig into the user settings proved that duplex printing was disabled, no problem enable that, and problem fixed. Right? Nope! Ok back to the drawing board, check settings on the printer, Duplex enabled. Ok. Print server? Disabled. Universal Print? Disabled. So after running down every conceivable location for the duplex settings, I was feeling reasonably confident that the issue would be resolved. Alas, not.
So I turn to the mainstay of all sysadmins the world over and start googling. Which produced nothing particularly useful save a Brother troubleshooting article and several forum posts with people having the same issue but predominantly on Macs. The general consensus from all of this post was that it was a driver issue, or rather a driver update incompatibility issue. I have at least now got a working theory. Handily, updating the driver using the Windows print server proved challenging so in the end I decided to pull a Ripley. Totally remove the troublesome printer and reinstall it on the print server using the most up-to-date dedicated drivers available from the Brother website. Deploy the new printer and away we go.
I have to say, this is one situation where Universal Print for Azure really comes into it’s own. Once the printer was redeployed on the print server and added to universal print the new configuration could be rolled out seamlessly by switching printers in the Univeral Print console.
I figured I would do a quick write up in case in was of any assistance to anybody.
Thanks for having a read.
Pete
