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Cannot Add Printer Because “Add printer” Screen is Blank – SENTINEL Problem

Target Audience: Advanced User, IT Manager
Article #: 9756

Summary

SENTINEL users often add printers to SENTINEL by accessing the “Add Printer” screen from the CODESOFT Printing Plug-in feature. You can find this feature when opening a SENTINEL Watch within the SENTINEL Manager application. This article explains a problem we experienced where the “Add Printer” screen was blank on a client’s system as it could not see the list of available printers.

List of printers not populating “Add printer” screen in SENTINEL

Situation and symptoms

  • SENTINEL v2015 running in production
  • SENTINEL Watch used to add printer Enabled and Active
  • Selecting the Add button from the CODESOFT Plug-in screen shows that the Add printer screen is blank. It does not show the available printers and ports
  • Server was recently reset due to a SENTINEL stuck in Processing mode
Adding a printer using the CODESOFT Printing Plug-in inside of SENTINEL

Explanation

It appears SENTINEL could not access the list of print drivers provided by TEKLYNX in this case. SENTINEL references the same files and information used by CODESOFT. In fact, part of installation of SENTINEL includes CODESOFT. Therefore, we first believed that either Windows was blocking SENTINEL from accessing the CODESOFT printer information, or that one of the files that stores this information (e.g. config file, dll, etc.) was corrupt.

Solution

We first opened CODESOFT on the server (after activating the license) and then accessed the Add printer screen from CODESOFT. All available printers and ports appeared. After closing CODESOFT (and disconnecting it from the license server used to activate it), the SENTINEL Add printer function in the CODESOFT Printer Plug-in worked.

Adding a printer from CODESOFT

Although not proven, it appears that using CODESOFT to access the new printer and port information forced a repair or update to the files accessed by SENTINEL. Since it worked after disconnecting CODESOFT from the license server, we do not believe this fix had anything to do with software activation.

Additional comments

Issue Found: SENTINEL v2015

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Author

Dave Klement

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