Any wya to monitor data going into the print spooler?

[Kelemvor]

Howdy,

We're having an issue at work where sometimes our printers go offline and we have to restart the print spooler on the machine doing the printer. We've analyzed it far enough to see that the printer is receiving "garbage" data which is screwing up the communication between the print spooler and the printer. Stopping and restarting the print spooler will generally resolve the issue and it will start to print again.

What we're trying to figure out is if there's any way we can see the data BEFORE it hits the printer spooler. We're not sure if it's being corrupted by the app doing the printing or if it's being corrupted in the print spooler itself.

If anyone has any ideas on how we can possibly monitor/intercept the data before it gets to the spooler, let me know.

Thanks.

 

[ViRGE]

Howdy,

We're having an issue at work where sometimes our printers go offline and we have to restart the print spooler on the machine doing the printer. We've analyzed it far enough to see that the printer is receiving "garbage" data which is screwing up the communication between the print spooler and the printer. Stopping and restarting the print spooler will generally resolve the issue and it will start to print again.

What we're trying to figure out is if there's any way we can see the data BEFORE it hits the printer spooler. We're not sure if it's being corrupted by the app doing the printing or if it's being corrupted in the print spooler itself.

If anyone has any ideas on how we can possibly monitor/intercept the data before it gets to the spooler, let me know.

Thanks.

Grab a hub, put it between the printer and the network. Because the hub is a stupid device, it will replicate all traffic between the network and the printer across all ports. You can then plug a PC running Wireshark into the hub and have it capture all of the traffic for analysis.

 

[Kelemvor]

I guess I should have mentioned that this is a USB printer connected directly to a PC. We know the data getting to the printer driver is corrupted so we're trying to find it sooner than that in the process. I'm assuming it'd be something internal to Windows XP...