Getting Printer Info From a Print Server Cluster

WMI won't talk to clustered print servers. Registry spelunking and PowerShell to the rescue.

Originally published on blog.benvirgilio.com

Unfortunately it is not possible to use WMI to obtain information from a clustered print server regarding printers. This makes it very difficult to dump a complete list of printers within the domain you are administering.

However this information is stored in an alternate location within the registry (HKLM:\Cluster\Resources), after a few hours of research I stumbled across this post on Experts Exchange:

http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/Scripting/Powershell/Q_25647470.html

I made some slight modifications to WTarlton’s script in order to extract the name, location and port (IP address) from the keys and save the output to a CSV file. It took me some time to find this information and a bit of trial and error to discover that Get-WMIObject doesn’t play nice with server clusters, so I hope that by reproducing WTarlton’s script and making some modifications this will save some time for other people running into the same issues.

##########################################################################
#
# Filename: Utility-GetPrintersFromCluster.ps1
# Author: Ben Virgilio
# Revision: 1.0
# Updated On: 6/27/2013
#
# This script will extract printer names, IP address and location from
# HKLM:\Cluster\Resources.
#
# Registry Code Credit:
# http://www.experts-exchange.com/Programming/Languages/Scripting/Powershell/Q_25647470.html
#
# Revision History:
# 1.0 - Initial script
#
##########################################################################

$Spoolers = @()
$printvalues = @()
$Resources = Get-ChildItem HKLM:\Cluster\Resources
foreach ($Resource in $Resources){
	$values = Get-ItemProperty $Resource.pspath
	foreach ($value in $values){
		if ($value.Type -ne $Null -and $value.Type.tolower() -eq "print spooler"){
			[string]$Path = $Resource.pspath + "\Parameters\Printers"
			$Spoolers += $Path
		}
	}
}

foreach ($Spooler in $Spoolers){
	$Printers = Get-ChildItem $Spooler
	foreach ($Printer in $Printers){
		#$Printer | fl *
		$value = Get-ItemProperty $Printer.pspath
		$printvalues += $value
	}
}

$printvalues | Select-Object Name,Location,Port | Export-CSV C:\printerlist.csv