Once again, a fun little doozy with rabbit holes leading in all the wrong directions. A typical 5 minute thing turns into a 4 hour hair-pulling exercise! Tried to share 2 printers from a Windows 10 computer to another Windows 10 computer, and the other Windows 10 computer could not access them; they showed up as shared printers, but I got the dreaded 0x000000709 (note number of zeros may be off) error whenever I tried to connect to the printer.
Doing some searching leads you to believe this was due to a security update that was pushed some time ago to mitigate Print Nightmare, or perhaps a new issue having to do with RPC in Windows 11. (Why so many Windows 11 results when I clearly put Windows 10 in the search baffles me too). The real answer? Neither (ish).
Things I tried
After spending 4 hours feeling like an IT luddite that can’t share a printer, I just could NOT get 2 shared printers to work between two Windows 10 22H2 computers. I rebooted/restarted/tried a zillion things, such as:
- temporarily disabling print nightmare mitigation registry keys/GPOs (which IS needed to actually share the computers, otherwise you get “policies on this computer prevent spooler from allowing remote connections)
- Looking for Windows 11 RPC settings in local group policy (hint: not there in Windows 10)
- Connected monitor/keyboard/mouse and access locally (I was RDP’d into the computer doing the sharing)
- Rebooted 900 times
Interestingly, I can share printers in the other direction NO PROBLEM. I can ping the computer no problem. I can access it’s root drive share no problem. It shows up in ADUC no problem.
The Fix
In the end, I happened to notice something: When looking at the “print server properties” screen (which you can access from the printers and scanners screen), the screen only showed the partial computer name. Wait WHUT? I verified the computer name was correct under System, but realized that I used too-long of a name for the old name format, so it truncated. In doing so, the print spooler was using the truncated name so it wouldn’t match the full proper fqdn. ARE YOU FRIGGIN KIDDING ME.
Here’s where things get interesting; I can’t rename the computer! Maybe something is goofy with this particular PC or maybe something glitched when I joined it to the domain, but it reports an error of “Cannot rename computer in Azure Active Directory”. Interesting, as this is not an Azure-joined computer .
OK fine, it’s domain join is corrupt. Let’s just pull it off the domain and rejoin. No can do; it wants me to verify a local user account first, which is fine, however nothing I enter is working, despite ensuring that the account I’m using is in fact local, and proper password set. I tried using \\computername\username, as well as .\username as well, no bueno.
What finally worked, was I signed out of the domain account, and signed in USING the local admin account. Now when I try to remove the domain, it didn’t prompt me to verify, and did actually remove. Perhaps there was some truth to the corrupted domain join, as the computer account on the domain didn’t show disabled/tombstoned or anything once I removed it. I manually removed the computer account to ensure this sucker is GONE.
Before re-joining, I renamed the computer to something simpler/shorter, then re-joined again. This time, everything went through fine, and I had no problems sharing the printers.
Once again, hopefully this ends up in someone’s desperate searching and they get quick answers instead of rabbit holes to nowhere. Happy IT’ing!