I was just writing up a question to post and I figured out the answer just before submitting. Since this could happen to someone else, I decided I would keep the question in place and then put the solution.
Problem:
When deploying “BES Web Reports: Enable PDF Reports - Part 2/2” the action script runs the command rundll32 printui.dll,PrintUIEntry /if /b “BES Web Reports Printer” /f %windir%\inf\ntprint.inf /r “G:\Program Files (x86)\BigFix Enterprise\BES Server\BESReportsData\ArchiveData__pdf\out.ps” /m “Xerox Phaser 6180MFP-D PS” and hangs here.
When I try to manually execute the command, a dialog with the message “the arguments are invalid” appears. From the reading I have done, it seems to point to the name of the printer (/m parameter), must exist in the ntprint.inf file, which on the systems I have, it does not.
As anyone seen this issue, if so, how did you work around it?
The Web Reports server is on Windows 2008 R2
Solution:
When the server was built, it was installed with IIS. Since we wanted to use port 80 for IEM Web Reports, we removed IIS. Turns out that when you do that, it does not free up port 80. There are quite a few hits on it, but basically it has something to do with HTTP.sys locking the port. The one hit we looked at was http://superuser.com/questions/352017/pid4-using-port-80. The instruction that was followed was to disable the HTTP driver and after a reboot, the port was freed. All was good.
Well not so good. When the rundll32 executes, it needs the print spooler to be running and the print spooler has a dependency on, yep you guessed it, HTTP, so the spooler would not start. So I set it to “demand” and started the print spooler. Now it seems that everything is working correctly. I did have to also run the following registry update as this did not complete as part of the fixlet. Note the HKEY_Users might be different for you depending on the id the web reports service is running as. Refer to the fixlet to help determine the source.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_USERS\S-1-5-18\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows]
“Device”=“BES Web Reports Printer,winspool,Ne00:”
[HKEY_LOCAL _MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\BigFix\Enterprise Server\BESReports]
“PDFEnable”=“1”