Administer Windows Core Print Servers

Last updated Nov 14, 2023

• Powershell
• Print servers
• Windows server core
• Terminal tip tuesdays

You RDP to a print server and where you expected to see a Windows Server desktop environment, you are presented with a black screen with nothing more than a terminal window. How are you going to administer the print server?

Sure, you could launch the Print Management application from another server and then remotely administer the print server from there, and that’s perfectly acceptable. But PowerShell can take care of this as well!

Here are some ways to complete common print server tasks using PowerShell in a Windows Core environment.

Need to see what printers are installed on the print server?

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Get-Printer

Need to see what print jobs are pending for a printer on the server?

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Get-PrintJob -PrinterName printer01

Need to check basic configurations such as if the printer is set to default to color printing, or double-sided printing (duplexing)?

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Get-PrintConfiguration -PrinterName printer01

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Get-PrinterDriver

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Get-PrinterPort

Once you’ve gotten the print job in question using the above command and noted the ID of the print job, you can pipe that output into the Remove-PrintJob command:

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Get-PrintJob -ID 1 | Remove-PrintJob

A common task on print servers is to bounce (restart) the Print Spooler service. This can be accomplished like so:

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Restart-Service -Name spooler

There are many other tasks you can perform for print servers hosted on Windows Core servers. Additionally, as with most PowerShell commands, you can invoke these commands remotely by using the Invoke-Command command and specifying the remote print server’s name in the -ComputerName parameter.

Don’t hesitate to use the terminal to perform these tasks! It can definitely be faster, especially as you get more comfortable with the command line.