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Windows: Printer management from command line

by Tommy Andersen
written by Tommy Andersen

I figured that I would do a short article on how to do some basic printer management from cmd i Windows.

Overall there are two ways in which to manage printers from the Windows command line (batch scripts). Either using the Printer User Interface, known as PrintUI. Or by using the Windows Management Instrumentation Command or WMIC for short. Obviously using Powershell is also an option (however we wont go into that here).

PrintUI

Is a tool that’s been a part of every Windows version at least since Windows XP – and still Works fine on Windows 10. And it totally looks the same. It allows you to do a million things. You’ll need to load it via rundll32 as such:

This will give you a complete list of commands to use. You can see them all here by clicking below.

A few obviously examples of use would be to install and install a printer from a server.  This can be achieved as follows.

WMIC printer

As mentioned the beginning, you can also use WMIC. The cool thing about WMIC compaired to the alternative above, is that you can add some logic to your actions. For example by removing all network printers in one go…

One important note. This actually only removes printers which are installed as network printer – It DOES NOT remove printers which are network printers, but installed via a local TCP IP port. To remove these you need to specify them separately. This however can be achieved simply by:

Be carefull with this tough. I have personally, on more then one occasion, managed to remove all printers from a system with a wrongfully conceived WMIC one-liner . Efficient though.

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MiscellaneousSoftwareWindows

Adobe Acrobat: Problem solving tips

by Tommy Andersen
written by Tommy Andersen
I was looking through some old notes of mine, from back in the day, when I was supporting large user groups, working at a large unnamed danish company. So I figured that would do a short post with some of these things. Partly to have the notes in one place, secondly to clean up my computer – but mainly cause someone out there might find it useful. Share the knowledge! Here we go….

Problems starting Acrobat: The Font Cache

I have found that certain issue with the Adobe Font Cache LST file, can prevent the application from working properly (or at all). I realized that deleting the Font cache will trigger the application to re-build it on the next run – thus having no negative effekt on the program, making this a quick and dirty first-attempt-blind-troubleshooting for problems with Acrobat & Acrobat Reader. The file in questions is called AcroFnt<version>.lst, where <version> is the Acrobat version number. So for example: AcroFnt11.lst. It’s located under: For older versions of Windows, its under: As you can probably tell. These example are for Adobe Reader XI (i.e. version 11). You can just modify location and filename if you have an older or newer version. Or you can create a batch file which just deletes all relevant variations. So that way – if you have a machine with Acrobat / Adobe Reader that is causing problems. Try this first. Crude, yes. But effective, as is will fix some issues with little effort on your part.

Wont open attachments

By default Adobe Reader has some security measures in place to prevent users from carelessly opening, say, an attached .zip file – just in case it would contain containing something maleficent. This list can be modify via the registry: in a key named: tBuiltInPermList This key contains a pipe delimited list of extensions and a corresponding integer value. If the integer is set to 3 it means that the extension is NOT allowed. If set to 1 it IS allowed. So you simply have to change the value from 3 to 1 for your favorite extensions. Below is what I have (Adobe Reader XI)… I goes without saying that this present a security issue if you’re not careful. Modify at your own peril.
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ScriptingWindows

Bitlocking USB sticks with a fixed password from powershell

by Tommy Andersen
written by Tommy Andersen

The other day I was working with a client in order to ensure that all the USB keys they handed out internally, were encrypted using bitlocker. In this case, we needed a simple way of encrypting 30-40 new, unused USB sticks without having to go through the GUI for each one. So I started looking into doing this using powershell.

A few Google searches later and I had been through the Microsoft documentation as well as a great post blot.matticus.net where he walks through some of his basic thoughts for creating a usbdrivepretool. All good stuff. But first of all: It wouldn’t run on my system at all (kept throwing various errors). Also it was somewhat over-engineered for my purpose. So I figured that I would have a crack at it myself.  How hard could it really be?

My requirements

Basically I just wanted to automate the following simple task. I don’t need something highly complex. And I don’t need it to work for other purposes

  1. I must enter enter a drive letter.
  2. Script must format the USB stick.
  3. Script must encrypt the USB stick using Bitlocker.
    1. All the USB sticks should have the same password.
    2. All the USB sticks should have the same volume label.

Considerations

Filesystem: To FAT or not to FAT.

By default a USB key is formatted with FAT32. This is an old school file system, which has a few limitation. The reason most USB sticks are still shipped with FAT32 i suspect, is due to backwards and cross platform compatability. When using FAT32, it will work with your old computer, with your smart TV and your new Macbook.

One of the downsides however, is that you cannot store files larger than 4GB/file on a FAT32 FS. A problem if you’re storing large zip archives or movies – Otherwise not really (in the case of my users). Still, I strongly considered using NTFS instead, as we’re talking about USB keys with Bitlocker (i.e. intended for Windows users), so the cross platform and backwards compatibility doesn’t really apply anyway. But I ended up keeping them FAT32 for now.

Recovery password

I specifically didn’t want a recovery password. Even though this may be good practice when encrypting, well  – basically any normal drive. In this case however, all the drives are cheap 8GB USB sticks and they all have the same password. If, for some odd reason, the drive cannot be accessed. I would simply re-roll it. So it doesn’t matter whether I have the recovery password – and it would add a level of complexity, managing the devices, which just isn’t required here.

The script

Lets dive into it. The script. After I create my bitlockusb.ps1 file. The first thing i want is to be able to set the drive letter of my USB drive. Simply asking for the drive letter would suffice. To make it a bit easier to use, however, I want to be able to parse the variable when running the script. I.e.

This can be done easily by reading the parameter using Read-Host as such.

Moving on a want a few other variables containing the static password and the label name.

Then I need the drive as an object, so that we can work with it down the line.

The Get-WmiObject contains a bunch of interesting things. Try running this from a powershell prompt, and you will see on the information (or “properties”) for this object. You may be able to use some of them in your own implementation.

Doing the business

First we want to format the drive. The reason for this is, that we will have Bitlocker encrypt used-disk-space-only. The effect is that the encryption process is fully completed in less then a minute, given that the USB stick is empty (thus the formatting). If the USB stick has files on it, this process can take much longer.

After that, we start encrypting the drive. We’ll go with an AES256 encryption.

When the command is done, the encryption process isn’t actually complete. And we don’t want someone to remove the drive, while that’s going on.

Now, you can always tell the state of the encryption process by typing manage-bde -status e:  (if e: is your drive-letter). But we don’t want to keep checking that manually.

So instead we’ll create a “while”-statement to listen and output something while we wait for it to complete. So while the percentage is less then 100%, write on the screen…

Then when it’s done, it’s always nice with a status. So it seems suiting to use the manage-bde -status  command here.

A tiny level of safety

So in order not to mistakenly format some random drive, we’ll want a dialogue to prompt us if we are sure – before the scripts does it’s thing. So let’s wrap everything in the “doing the business” section of this article, in the following if statement:

Then it won’t be that dangerous.

The complete script

Adding a few comments and some explanatory output, the complete scripts looks as follows.

I’m fairly happy with it. Sure, I could think of a number of way to extend it. Make it more clever. Perhaps having it ask again at the end, if you have another drive to format and encrypt. Perhaps making the FS selectable. Perhaps verify that the drive is actually available before it runs, and much much more. So it’s by no mean idiot proof. But for now, and for me, it’s sufficient.

It obviously requires an elevated powershell prompt, aswell as an unencrypted (USB) drive as the target.

Enjoy.

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We haven't seen the last printer related issue yet.

Windows

Fixing printing in Windows, 101

by Tommy Andersen
written by Tommy Andersen

Printing. One of the most basic features of any computer and it still cause so many problems for so man people. Between legacy printer drivers, millions of printer brands/models as well as outdated drivers shipped with each printer sold – then no: We haven’t seen the last printer related issue yet.

That old driver

Many printer drivers from “back in the day when I bought my old printer” simply aren’t compatible with newer versions and/or 64 bit version of Windows. This can cause Windows to seemingly “loose” the connection to printers from time to time. The culprit is usually the driver, which can cause the local print Spooler or Netbios service to stall or crash completely. Now, obviously you should attempt to resolve this by removing the old printer drivers, and installing the latest compatible drivers from the manufacturers website. However sometimes that simply is not possible. I therefore decided to write a shortlist of my personal “let’s try to…”  commands, in the hopes of helping someone in a similar situation.

Restarting the print spooler

Now, usually the first you one tries is restarting the Print spooler. This can easily be done from the services.msc snap-in, but I find that’s it’s a good idea to be a bit more thorough. Therefore I usually also stop the TCP/IP NetBIOS Helper service and delete any pending jobs in %windir%\System32\Spool\Printers\.

Using a batch script it can be done as follows:

The batch job above should be fairly straight forward. First the two services are stopped. Then a small pause (good practice…well, I like it anyway). Then I delete everything from %windir%\System32\Spool\Printers\, which contains pending print jobs. Then I start the services again.

Uninstalling network printers from the commandline

Sometimes useful when you want to remove a specific printer from one or more machines, as this method allows both uninstalling local and network printers.

The command /dn defines that you want to delete the printer and /n allows you to specify the printer via it’s hostname. Same thing when installing. The /in option tells it to install and, once again, /n lets you define the printer via it’s name.

For a full list of command line options when using printUI, simply run:

It works on most Windows versions.

Using WMIC to uninstall printers

Using the Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line / Console provides us with the cool features when uninstalling printers.

Uninstalling all Network printers

Obviously you can do the reverse as well, where you remove all local printers but non of the networked ones

One important note. Turns out that this only removes printers installed as network printer – It DOES NOT remove printers which are network printers, but are installed via a local TCP IP port. To remove these you need to specify them separately. This could be done as such:

Which will remove (delete) all TCP printers using an IP.

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Scripting

There was a problem sending the command to the program in MS Office

by Tommy Andersen
written by Tommy Andersen

You may encounter certain situation where Excel, Word or the interaction between the two, are causing some weird errors. One of the most generic being:

There was a problem sending the command to the program in MS Office

In my experience, this is often caused by corrupt formatting data in the registry or in the document template(s). Clearing all these settings, sometimes solve this problem.

The problems are with HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\<version>\<application>\Options as well as HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\<version>\<application>\Data – where version is the office version you have installed (i.e. 12.0 or 14.0) and the application is either word or excel.

Solving the problem

Note: Remember to close Word and Excel before you attempt this. And obviously, as always, you need to run this from an elevated command prompt.

In this example I’m just going to clear the settings for all office versions (since XP) in one go. May as well, as that just gives us a single script to run, no matter the version. And since it will just fail and move on, if the entry doesn’t exist, it doesn’t really matter.

Also deleting templates…

Deleting your document templates and any temporary cached versions of these, may also be a good idea.

Hopefully it helps.

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Scripting

Forcing Windows to use Windows Photo Viewer

by Tommy Andersen
written by Tommy Andersen

A bit of history

I see it all the time. People install some God-awful image viewer (*cough* Quicktime *cough*) and it overtakes their default image file associations. Annoying. As if image files weren’t already hunted pray. Furthermore we now also have Windows 10 (and to some extend 8 and 8.1) pushing us to use the Metro app: Pictures. Personally I don’t really mind Pictures that much, though I must admit to still using the classic Windows Photo Viewer. I find it a slightly faster when quick-stepping through a bunch of images using the arrow keys – and besides, it seems more clean and simple; which is a good thing.

A while back, long before Windows 10 was even a foggy wet dream at Redmond, I wrote a “reset script” which sets the most common image file types: jpeg/jpg, gif, png and tif/tiff, back to using Windows Photo Viewer. So when a similar issue landed on my desk the other day, I figured that I would take a look at it again and perhaps give it a much needed overhaul.

Addressing the problem

Ignoring completely that we could obviously just set these things from within the Windows GUI. Using ftype and assoc today, we need to take many things into account.

Ye olden days Windows (xp)

Back when everyone was running Windows XP, it was a simply matter og using the ftype and assoc commands to update the registry entries for each file association. Example:

(Note the double %% before the 1, which you need to omit if you run the commands directly from a prompt)

Newer Windows versions

However that obviously wouldn’t suffice for newer version of Windows. And not only due to the fact that the image viewer is different and therefore must be associated differently – but also since there are various things in place, which prevents you from changing the file associations that way (in addition to the obvious elevation concerns). If we simply ignore that however, and just update to script. It would look like this:

Now that may actually be sufficient in certain cases. However, especially looking at Windows 10, there at a number of additional things which you need to take into account.

First of all. If you’re running a clean Windows 10 installation, you won’t even have Windows Photo Viewer available to you until you apply a small fix (Yes, I’m calling it a fix…deal with it).

Secondly, Windows 10 has triggers in place, which will detect if you change the file associations for certain file types in certain ways and reset these back to their default value (which means back to the Pictures app in this case). So in order to avoid that, we wan’t to start by setting a few registry entries BEFORE we change the associations, so that Windows minds it’s own business. To learn a bit more about this problem, you can start be reading this. For now though we simply need to set the following two registry entries. Using the command line methodology from earlier, it can be done as follows.

Then we need to start fresh. The easiest way, I found, was to delete the registry entries for each file association before re-creating them from the command line. So let’s delete them:

And then we can run the script from ealier to associate the extensions correctly.

The completed Windows 10 script

Now looking at the complete script, it should look something like this.

Remember to run it elevated. Enjoy!

 

 

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