General printing question

[tonerhead]

General printing question. We all have witnessed print jobs crash a mfp or printer. You unplug network and restart printer...... all good until you plug in network and printer crashes again. I am primarily familiar with Ricoh products. I know you can turn on access codes and it will flush the incoming jobs and problem solved. It works to get customer running again anyway until they determine what/who is crashing the printer.


Now we are taking on other brands in addition to Ricoh.


Are there better/other ways to "flush" offending print jobs sent to an ip address?


I recently had a college printer that kept crashing. I felt helpless to help them. I think someone was printing to wrong ip and there was a simple driver conflict. They needed to print and couldn't, every time you connected the printer to network, the printer crashed. Two days later, the offending computer/print job was gone and things are back to normal, but they were without a printer for 2 days.

What is a better way to do this other than changing ip address?

[ZOOTECH]

Re: General printing question

Not sure about Richo products, but other brands do not play well with WSD ports.

[tjvincent]

General printing question

I had a Ricoh device at a large company that even after enabling user codes would not delete the print job after dealing with the company's IT dept they couldn't figure out where the job was coming from either. Eventually they had to change the IP on the printer.

[blackcat4866]

Re: General printing question

Not sure about Ricoh products, but other brands do not play well with WSD ports.

True dat.

I had a Ricoh device at a large company that even after enabling user codes would not delete the print job after dealing with the company's IT dept they couldn't figure out where the job was coming from either. Eventually they had the change the IP on the printer.

Changing the IP is the only sure way deflect those corrupt print jobs. Applications like Printfleet, which go through and ping every IP, can cause this issue also. =^..^=

[KenB]

Re: General printing question

If there is any regularity to the bad jobs, you could set up a Wireshark capture to run at that time.

The information will be in the capture.

Of course, this approach won't work if the bogus jobs are unpredictable.

[slimslob]

Re: General printing question

If there is any regularity to the bad jobs, you could set up a Wireshark capture to run at that time.

The information will be in the capture.

Of course, this approach won't work if the bogus jobs are unpredictable.

Provided that the customer IT will allow you to do so.

[KenB]

Re: General printing question

I once had a very large print shop with a production sized Canon color MFP with a Fiery.

At least 2 or 3 times a month, it would lock up and stop printing jobs.

Anyone who has ever supported a Fiery knows about the "Clear Server" dance you have to do when this happens.

The customer knew how to do this, but this was more than an inconvenience each time, as it was a very busy machine, and they would lose valuable production time.

From Command Workstation, I exported the log, and saw that each time it crashed, the same user had printed the last successful job. Hmmmmm....

Turned out that said user was the one and only CorelDraw fan, and the driver on his Workstation was totally misconfigured (he had selected the wrong ppd file). His jobs printed OK, but would cause the Fiery to fail on any subsequent jobs.

After fixing his issue, all jobs started flowing normally.

[tonerhead]

Re: General printing question

One tech I work with actually carries a small oki printer along for such instances. Just plugs it in and fills with paper. It seems to handle corrupt jobs the best he said. I don't want to do that though.

[ApeosMan]

Re: General printing question

Usually the problematic print jobs you describe are caused by fonts the printer cannot interpret or decide how it should handle it.

In Windows you could default the print driver to print true type fonts as bitmap and this should eliminate most of these sorts of problems. This sort of a approach may cause larger fonts not to look as nice as it's being printed as a bitmap, but most users wouldn't notice any difference.

This also all depends on the print driver language type being used, some will download the fonts, others will reference and some allow to download as bitmap.

Different printer manufacturers will design handling issues like this differently and if you read firmware update notes you will often find fixes to resolve font interpretation issues.