I am having an inconsistent and intermittent printer problem. I hope someone here can help me.
I have 20 networked printers in my WinNT 4.0 domain. The printers are set up on a dedicated printer server (a Pentium III 1GHz box running WinNT 4.0 Server, SP6A, 384MB memory, 40GB hard drive) via static IP addresses--that is, the printers have static IP addresses that are excluded from the DHCP pool available to the rest of the domain. The printers are shared off of the printer server, and our domain clients establish connections to those shares. There are approx. 150 workstations (NT 4.0) in our domain, and we are using both TCP/IP and IPX/SPX protocols (our main file server is a Netware server, but we are not utilizing the Netware print services). The vast majority of those printers are HP LaserJets (5Si, 2100, 4100, 8100) with internal EIO card and then we have some Kyocera copier-printers and a few wide-format inkjet printers with external HP JetDirect servers, all configured for TCP/IP printing.
Every so often, on different printers, print jobs will hang with a generic error message "printing--printer error". It usually takes a shutdown and restart of the printer, and restarting the print job, to get the document printed. There does not seem to be a consistent factor when it comes to the documents that hang--sometimes a 20K word document, sometimes 5MB Printshop image, most in between in size and complexity.
The reason I'm so stumped is because it's not just one or two printers that consistently display this behavior; I won't say it's happened to all 20
printers, but a majority of them have experienced this. And it doesn't happen all the time--but enough to be annoying and puzzling.
Any pointers as to where to start looking for solutions would be much appreciated.
Thank you in advance,
Hyun Yu
I have 20 networked printers in my WinNT 4.0 domain. The printers are set up on a dedicated printer server (a Pentium III 1GHz box running WinNT 4.0 Server, SP6A, 384MB memory, 40GB hard drive) via static IP addresses--that is, the printers have static IP addresses that are excluded from the DHCP pool available to the rest of the domain. The printers are shared off of the printer server, and our domain clients establish connections to those shares. There are approx. 150 workstations (NT 4.0) in our domain, and we are using both TCP/IP and IPX/SPX protocols (our main file server is a Netware server, but we are not utilizing the Netware print services). The vast majority of those printers are HP LaserJets (5Si, 2100, 4100, 8100) with internal EIO card and then we have some Kyocera copier-printers and a few wide-format inkjet printers with external HP JetDirect servers, all configured for TCP/IP printing.
Every so often, on different printers, print jobs will hang with a generic error message "printing--printer error". It usually takes a shutdown and restart of the printer, and restarting the print job, to get the document printed. There does not seem to be a consistent factor when it comes to the documents that hang--sometimes a 20K word document, sometimes 5MB Printshop image, most in between in size and complexity.
The reason I'm so stumped is because it's not just one or two printers that consistently display this behavior; I won't say it's happened to all 20
printers, but a majority of them have experienced this. And it doesn't happen all the time--but enough to be annoying and puzzling.
Any pointers as to where to start looking for solutions would be much appreciated.
Thank you in advance,
Hyun Yu
Facebook
Twitter