Error 0x000006d9 when sharing a printer on Windows 2008 R2

When sharing a printer on a Windows 2008 R2 machine (or on Windows 7 for that matter), the operation might fail with the following error message:

Printer settings could not be saved. Operation could not be completed (error 0x000006d9)

This could happen if the Windows Firewall service on the computer is stopped or disabled. Enabling the service fixes the problem!

This might seem strange at first but if file or print sharing has never been used on that computer before, the spooler service tries to contact the Windows Firewall service to configure incoming rules for File and Print Sharing. If the service is not running, the process fails with the error mentioned above.

The error message goes away once the service is started and sharing can be configured as required. Once sharing is enabled, Windows Firewall service can be returned back to its original state. As the required ports are now open, sharing will keep working fine after that.

Hope this helps!

About the Author: Ather Beg

Ather is a Senior Specialist Solutions Architect and works for Amazon Web Services. His focus is on all things related to cloud, technology, storage, virtualization and whatever comes in between. Being in the industry for over 27 years, Ather has been a vExpert for 10 years running and is also vExpert NSX/HCX/CloudProvider. He has also been an official VMware blogger at VMworld EU and US and is one of the founding members and contributor to Open HomeLab Wiki and co-hosts @OpenTechCast as well. Ather’s natural habitat is tech events like VMworld, Cloud (and other) Field Days, VMUGs etc. and he thrives on meeting like-minded people and having a good old chat about technology. He’s friendly and not dangerous at all so please do interact with him whenever you spot him in such surroundings.

4 Comments

machin July 20, 2012 at 10:32 AM - Reply

Enabling the Firewall doesn’t solve anything if the computer is in a remote location. You just loose the hand.
Dan July 18, 2013 at 1:10 PM - Reply

We experience the Server “losing” printers after dis/enable the F/W as per this article.
I added two new printers y’day, en/disabled the F/W to share ’em. Works.
24 hrs later these two ( and only these ) are gone again for what ever reason. Had to repeat everything to make ’em visible again. The printers are from Kyocera and we’re using some printer-specific “profiles” ( that is, essentially shortcuts to certain hardware-settings ) for certain jobs. The server driver publishes these profiles around the network *only* when the printer is offered via AD, not via the classic browse-and-pick context. So I’m having to export profiles and manually having to import them onto each and every box using this one printer.
- Ather July 21, 2013 at 11:01 PM - Reply
  
  Hi Dan,
  
  Apologies for the delayed response, I was away. The only thing I can think of from the top of my head is if there are other ports that the printer is trying to communicate through and can’t. Do you have other printers of the same make/model having the same issue?
  
  Ather
Pravin September 3, 2013 at 8:40 AM - Reply

Hi,
Enable the Windows Firewall Service On server and Its we are able to share a printer on server.thanxxx