Printers disappear after running the Windows PaperCut Pocket/Hive printer installer

“Help! I’m a PaperCut admin, and I don’t see any new printers even after running the PaperCut Pocket/Hive printer installer successfully! What could cause this problem?”

This knowledge base article applies if you’ve run the PaperCut Pocket/Hive printer installer for Windows, and it appears to be successful, but the PaperCut Printer never shows up.

Every once in a while, we hear about users running the Windows PaperCut Pocket/Hive printer installer but unable to see any new printers afterward. In these cases, the installer successfully creates the printers but another process deletes them soon after creation! It’s a frustrating problem to be sure, but luckily there are some things we can check that might give us some insights into possible obstacles.

In the Pocket or Hive installer log, you may see the error:

ERROR: error while installing print client: could not find print queue after 10s: {"src":"main.go:166"}

Port 9265 is being used by another application

Port 9265 is being used by another application The PaperCut Printer is installed using the local port ‘9265’. If this port is already in use, the installation will not succeed.

We’ve seen the following services also commonly use this port:

• Chrome Helper Service
• Windows network client

How to fix the Chrome Helper Service message

When installing the PaperCut package on Mac and Windows, and you see the following:

Steps:

1. Close all Chrome tabs and the application.
2. Run the PaperCut package again and follow the prompts.
3. The install should now be successful and you can now open Chrome again.

A techie and want to understand why does this happen?
The Chrome app randomly takes ports across a range of publically available ports when you use a Chrome browser each time you open Chrome. In some instances, the 9265 port is used and sometimes not, hence why this problem shows up time to time.

Windows network client

Try the following to see if there is another process using this port.

Steps:

1. Open the Command Prompt window:
   1. Click Start
   2. Type command prompt, then press Enter
2. Type netstat -ano | find “9265”, then press Enter.

• LISTENING means that the port is in use.
• The Process ID (PID) in the example above is 6852.

Note 💡 If no results are returned, the port is not in use. Skip to the next section.

1. Type tasklist | find “PID”, then press Enter.

Important: Replace PID with the Process ID from the previous step. In this example, the PID is 6852.

The Internet Printing client is not installed

The Pocket/Hive Printer installer creates print queue connections using the IPP protocol. This feature is normally enabled by default on desktop versions of Windows but must be manually enabled on Windows Server editions. When this is not turned on, you may see that the client was successful, but no printer was added. In the Windows event logs, you may see events 301 and 302 on Windows workstations without the Internet Printing client.

To enable the service, follow these steps:

1. Click Start and navigate to Turn Windows features on or off
2. Expand Print Services, check the Internet Printing Client, and click OK.
3. Restart the Print Spooler service or the entire workstation (either will do).

Port 9265 is not open between the print client and the edge node

During the configuration process, the installer reaches out to an edge node on port 9165. You might see the same Event Viewer codes as above if there’s interference on the port. Take a look at your firewall to see if this and other required ports are open.

BitDefender might delete printers if you are on a public network

Customers using BitDefender should watch out for a specific feature that interferes with Mobility installer print queue creation. The Dynamic Mode feature changes the BitDefender filter’s aggressiveness depending on the network adapter’s connection profile status. In other words, BitDefender might delete print queues if your network adapter connection profile is Public. To resolve a “Dynamic Mode” issue, you can change the client’s connection profile from Public to Private.

Or, you can follow some instructions provided by one of our customers (thanks Sébastien!) to change the behavior in BitDefender:

1. Open the main BitDefender interface.

2. Go to the Protection window.

3. In the FIREWALL module, click the Settings button.

4. Go to the NETWORK ADAPTERS tab. Click the box corresponding to your network adapter and select Home/Office.

5. Go to the SETTINGS tab.

6. Click Edit stealth settings.

7. Set the switch corresponding to your network adapter to Off (grey switch). After that, click OK

8. Now go to the RULES tab and click Add rule.

9. In the upper part of the window, set the switch to YES, to Apply this rule to all applications.

10. Go to the Advanced tab.

11. Next to Custom Remote address, set the switch to On. Then, under it, type the IP of the device you want to connect to in its corresponding field.

12. Click OK.

NOTE: You can also specify the port for which the rule will be available. If you do not specify the port, the rule will apply to all ports.

Find out what is deleting the printer with Event Viewer

In Windows Event Viewer, PrintService after enabling the Print Service log, you log you may see events 301 or 302 with the message “Printer PaperCut Printer was deleted, and users will no longer be able to print to this printer. No user action is required.” This event will contain a PID for the process that deleted the printer, which will identify which process was responsible. In many cases, the PID goes hand in hand with svchost.exe. Unfortunately, this doesn’t narrow down the problem very much as Windows calls on the process often.

To turn on this log, open Windows Event Viewer, navigate to Applications and Services > Microsoft > Windows > PrintService and enable the Operational log.

Then look for event 301 or 302.

Something else…

There’s one trick we have up our sleeves to diagnose what’s going on. The support team will request that you reproduce the issue and obtain the Windows Pocket/Hive logs.

Once we’ve obtained that, we look for the command that is used to install the printer, which may look something like this…

2020–11–10 12:59:37.053 The command to install printer and driver:rundll32.exe printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /if /b “LaserJet-Color [Library]” /x /n “Not used” /m “PaperCut Global PostScript” /r "http://papercut.local:9165/printers/LaserJet-Color/users/fbaggins/6caa66dbb1ef679dd33caa3708870eb1b27569878d28777063808fdd354cc68f" /u /q

When the installer fails or doesn’t start it could also mean that:

• When some software installation renames a registry value on the client system. Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Providers\Internet Print Provider\Name to inetpp.dll.INACTIVE. The Name value should be inetpp.dll. A Print Spooler restart is required.

No dice? Let us know!

We would be happy to troubleshoot this with you directly, so please reach out at support.papercut.com!

For more information about PaperCut Pocket and Hive, check out the PaperCut Pocket and Hive Help Center or if you’re using Mobility Print, check out the Mobility Print Help Center.