Why are users seeing UAC, when installing shared printer drivers, when they were not previously after a printer host name change?

Question

I have a Windows 2008R2 print server hosting about 40 printers. For the longest time we had a Point and Print GPO that allowed the users to install the drivers for these printers without administrative interaction. Administrative Templates\Printers\Point and Print Restrictions: Disabled. This is still in place. Recently though that is no longer working.

Take the "sales" printer for example. People have been connected to it for years now and in the last few days, when someone tries to print, their computers (All Windows 7) have been asking to install a print driver. Even new users that have not been attached to that printer before are being asked for admin rights to install the printer. This has affected about half of the printers on this printer server. So some printers users are able to install just fine. So when someone has the issue I hop on their machine and provide my rights so the print driver will install.

I am sure I know of the catalyst that caused this but I have no idea how it directly relates. For inventory purposes, I updated the host names of the printers. To clarify I went on the web interface off all the printers and in each of their network IPv4 configurations I updated the host name from its generic Ricoh to be the same as the DNS record I made for the printer. So each printer has a share name, port name on the printer server which are both the same as the physical printers host name e.g. "sales". No changes have been made to the print server hosting these printers. I don't understand how that change would cause this.

In the case of the "sales" users it is preventing them from printing. We have to allow the driver to update before they can print. That is how we knew there was an issue and was able to tie it to my inventory update. These users are not all in the same OU in AD and both have the same policies applied anyway.

I am testing different GPOs as when you look up network printer driver GPOs there are more things people change than just the one I mentioned above.

Any ideas why what I did is causing this issue? Perhaps I am chasing the wrong tail and something else is wrong?

Answer 1

This was a recent MS security update MS16-087 that addressed an issue with the Windows Print Spooler and installation of print drivers.

The KB article here https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3170005 indicates that you'll need to update to Package Aware Print Drivers to bypass the prompting.