"A Referral Was Returned From The Server"

As much as I bitch and complain about the Apple OS, let's not forget that I have to support their chief rival's abortion in the corporate environment—and Windows is still far. and. away. a more fucked up system than macOS or OS X or whatever the hell the brain trust in Cupertino wants to call it these days could ever be.

The latest bit of banging-my-head-against-the-wall comes from that delightful little error message above. It popped up today while I was trying to install a driver for a standalone thermal printer. First off who was the genius that wrote it? Somewhere, at some point in time, some asshole programmer must have thought, "Let's write the most obscure error message possible."

For those of you who have the displeasure of encountering this bit of fuckery on a Windows 10 box running in a corporate (domain) environment, the solution is actually rather simple, but annoying as hell. Trying to run the offending installer as a local admin didn't work. Trying to run it with administrator rights didn't work. Disabling UAC (we're getting warmer, but still no cigar) was a suggested solution via the Google, but didn't solve the problem either. What I ultimately discovered that it was some godforsaken issue with something in the Domain Group Policy and UAC. Simply disabling UAC on the local machine won't fix the problem; and since I didn't have rights to do anything with the the Domain's Group Policy, the only way to make it work is to remove the device from the domain entirely in order for the software to install.

I now have this documented at work since apparently none of my coworkers have ever encountered it—with the current thorn-in-my-side (who already views and treats me as just an ignorant imaging tech and not a full-fledged desktop tech with more years of experience than she's been alive) looking at me like an escapee from the Short Bus when I told her I had to remove the machine from the domain in order to install a printer driver.

I'm glad it's Friday…

 

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