Ever been asked, hey the printer “TestPrinter-01” isn’t working, can you check out what’s going on? For those of us who have to manage hundreds or thousands for printers across distributed print servers, this becomes very difficult to figure out where to start. Where’s the print server this printer is hosted on? What IP Address does it have? What driver is it using?

Enter Get-ADPrinter to save the day. This tool does have on pre-requisite however. Printers that this tool looks for must be published in active directory. To use the tool simply do the following.

Get-ADPrinter -Printer TestPrinter-01

A PowerShell friendly output will then tell you the IP Address, Print Server, Driver, UNCName, and AD Location.

Below is the code I’ve written for this purpose. If you have an existing PowerShell module library with functions for your help desk or junior admins, this might be a good addition to those modules.

The tools being developed on this blog are available on the PowerShell gallery here! This means to begin using the tool set, simply run the following command to install them.


Install-Module -Name ServerAdminCommon

If you have previously installed the toolset, you can update the tools using following command:


Update-Module -Name ServerAdminCommon

As with all of the modules on this blog, you can find this tool on my github page for the ServerAdminCommon tool set.

Enjoy!

Disclaimer: All scripts and other powershell references on this blog are offered “as is” with no warranty. While these scripts are tested and working in my environment, it is recommended that you test these scripts in a test environment before using in your production environment.