2003 Printserver UNC path needs ALL UPPERCASE

[druiddk]

Hello,

We are using economy software called Navision which was originally developed for DOS but has since been bought out by Microsoft and is now running under Windows.

Our issue is when you type in a printer path in Navision its case sensitive so if i tell Navision to print to \\SERVER\PRINTER03 and the printer is mapped ad \\server\PRINTER03 it will not print.

We have 4 terminal servers and on one of these servers one printer is mapped as \\server\PRINTER03 where the other printers are mapped fine as \\SERVER\PRINTER01, \\SERVER\PRINTER02 etc. this is driving me crazy!!

I have played around with dontprettypath in the registry but this does not change anything when the printer is actually mapped/connected.

Could any please provide some ideas etc. as I am going insane over this!

[druiddk]

Alright I actually made a little bit of progress myself.

If i go to HKCU\Printers\Connections\,,server,PRINTER03 for a user that has the problem and change this to HKCU\Printers\Connections\,,SERVER,PRINTER03 then it works.

This would be annoying to do for all users and not everyone is supposed to have this printer and the problem also applies to new users.

Does anyone have any tips?

Thank you in advance!

[Tripredacus]

Are you using Active Directory? and if so did you set up your OUs accordingly? If so you could just add a login script to make these changes just for the users who use this printer.

[druiddk]

Thank you for taking time to respond.

Yes everything is nicely setup in active directory.

Even if the changes are made as soon as the user logs off and back on the changes are gone and the printer is again incorrectly setup.

I have tried to make a script that would fix it but the only way I can get it to work is remove the registry entry using .REG/batch goto regedit press F5 so it updates and THEN it will allow the creation of the new entry (with the same name but different case).

I would prefer to rather find out WHY it is not working on this one server but working perfectly on the 3 other servers we use.

[GrofLuigi]

Hi,

There is one interesting value S2003 looks for in the registry. I've always wondered what's it for, but it's not documented ANYWHERE.

DowncaseSPNBecauseApiOwnerIsTooLazy

(and quite humorous too). (SPN stands for Service Principal Name).

It's trying to read it many times (verified with ProcessMon).

Maybe you could try it if you want, if you think it applies to your case. I'm not at the computer with S2003 at the moment, but will be in several hours. Let me know if you want to try it, so I'll dig up the location (I think it was in services/tcpip/parameters).

GL

[druiddk]

Hi GL!

Thank you for your reply - it has given me hope.

Unfortunately I have been unable to locate the suggested string DowncaseSPNBecauseApiOwnerIsTooLazy anywhere in the registry of any of my 2003 terminal servers - for the record none of them are R2 and they are all running SP2.

[GrofLuigi]

If you want to try this crazy idea , here it is:

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Windows NT\DnsClient]
"DowncaseSpnCauseApiOwnerIsTooLazy"=dword:1

It doesn't exist by default.

GL

[druiddk]

Thank you for the tip... unfortunately it did not resolve the problem (I even tried rebooting a few times to be sure).