I spent a significant chunk of my day today trying to put out a fire.
I’d like to share what I found because I’ve seen people looking for solutions to this, but not a lot of good answers.
This week is payroll week for our organization, so check printing was on the schedule today.
Not a good day for GP to start throwing up error messages and booting our accounting personnel.
I started receiving emails around mid-morning complaining of error messages and freezing/locked out sessions.
My initial assessment was to clean up sessions. I had the users log out of the system, backed up the DB and ran scripts to clean DYNAMICS SY00800, SY00801 and clear out DEXSESSIONS and DEXLOCKS in TEMPDB. Always does the job, right? Heh…not this time.
We run GP in a Citrix environment with 2 terminal servers. We’ll call them Machine A and Machine B.
3 of the users who had been logged into Machine B were loaded onto Machine A upon re-entry.
No issues for them. User #4, however, kept getting directed back to Machine B (load balancing) and would immediately receive an error and get booted.
Remoted into Machine B and found an Application Error in the Local Server events.
Now, I’ve read a handful of different things regarding this type of error. Network-related, SQL Server-related, Profile-related, but no one with a hard “here it is!” solution.
Rather than chase down google leads, I narrowed my investigation down to those things that matched today’s conditions;
Accounting-only problems; hasn’t happened in the past; today is payroll run; user bombing out prints the checks.
With that handful of information, I decided to check printer connections on Machine B.
Navigated to Printers and found that the check printer wasn’t even installed on Machine B, which was interesting because it was defined in Named Printers for all accounting users. Those are set up on the server in GP, so it had been there. What happened?
Re-installed the printer and had user #4 try logging in; no issues.
As it turned out, one of our HD Technicians had swapped in a new printer.
Gave it the same name, but for whatever reason, Machine B lost connection with it.
So, Named Printers defined for the accounting users was looking for a non-existent printer on Machine B and there was…pain.
Moving forward, I’ve asked the HD folks to give me a heads up if they are swapping out printers, so I can confirm connections after replacement.
If you are a GP Administrator reading this, you might want to put the same policy in place.
