You find that printers on your Windows 2008 server are going offline randomly.

I experienced an issue when setting up new printers on a new print server and found that a few printers remained online where others were offline and my test prints queued. After restarting the print spooler, the print jobs went through fine but then the printer switched to offline again. I was able to ping the printer and get to the printer interface via a browser without any problems.

After some investigation and finding that it was not a firewall issue, I disabled SNMP on all the printers which were experiencing issues.

The ones which were running fine already had SNMP disabled, probably due to them not supporting SNMP. If you are experiencing issues try disabling SNMP and then investigate what’s interfering with SNMP.

To disabled SNMP, right click on the printer, click on Printer Properties, click the tab ‘ports’, click configure port and uncheck SNMP Status Enabled.

Your printer should come online straight away.