Localhost showing in Printer list

When populating printers from the PaperCut Print Provider, printers will be prefixed with the machine name, even if the printers are on the same system as the Application Server. In this list the printer names will appear as server-name\printer1.

A PaperCut administrator has recently submitted an issue where printers were suddenly re-added to the Printers list with localhost as the server name, meaning they had both a server-name\printer1 and a localhost\printer1 in this list. This can cause issues when running reports, as the printer will now report jobs on the localhost printer.

The administrator found that an SSL certificate on their print server had recently expired, and the only visible effect witnessed was the server reporting as localhost as the hostname. Once the certificate was renewed, the server started reporting the correct hostname.

Long story short, if nothing else has changed, try restarting your Print Server at a quiet time, and see if that resolves it.

Otherwise, for a more permanent fix, see below:

How to add Server Hostname in Print Provider

To set the Print Server hostname shown on the Application Server logs and in reports (instead of seeing localhost) you can use the below key in the ‘print-provider.conf’ file for the Print Provider.

# The system name reported by this server.  By default this is the current
# host name, however it may be useful to override this in some situations.
# For example, to alias printers under the name of an old server, or to report
# printers under the virtual name of a cluster rather than as an individual
# node.  For advanced users only.
#
# IMPORTANT: Changing the server name can have adverse affects on the system.
#            Please take care when making changes, and first discuss
#            options with the support team. The features most affected by
#            this change are: web print, find-me printing, printer load
#            balancing, watermarking and force color/duplex jobs.
#
#   Default:  <the systems current host name provided by the OS>
#   Examples: OldServer
#
ServerName=myprintserver

The Print Provider gets the full path of a queue name, i.e. the queue name in server\printer style, from Windows API and register it to the App Server. Thus, it really depends on Server or Windows implementation that how to handle localhost\printer and server-name\printer when localhost and server-name are the same machine.