[Misc] Network Printing Issues with 300i. 300ci and KM-2560

[Guest]

Hello everyone, I have been pulling my hair out for months trying to resolve this issue.

First off, let me give you a little info on our setup. We are running a WS2K3 print server. All our client machines are XP 32 bit. Our printers are mapped via a login script.

What seams to be happening is the printers will randomly lose there connection to the client machines. When the user trys to print, they will recieve either there are no print drivers installed or they will have the basic driver view when clicking on the properites of the printer. When either of these things occur, the users will expierience slow performance in office, especially in powerpoint. Another odd thing I have noticed is thedevice settings section of the print driver will keep losing accessories such as the finisher.

Please note that when the driver is loaded locally on the clients, everything works flawlessly.

I have tried disabling SNMP and well as disabling bi-directional printing to no avail.
I have tryed moving everything over to a new server as well as a new server that is on the same subnet as the clients and the printers.

Any insight into this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[blackcat4866]

This is just a theory, so tell me what you think. The latest versions of the driver have an automatic self-configure function that periodically checks that the accessories are configured correctly. If the printer is not seen across the network, perhaps the driver reverts to defaults? I don't know if there is a way to turn it off.

This sort-of fits with the "no print drivers installed" errors. What it comes down to then is, why are the printers dropping offline? Often printers are the lowest priority network traffic, so are the first to start dropping off of a high traffic network.

You probably already know this, but you'll want only one version of the driver running on any server/network. A common result of multiple versions of drivers is PostScript errors (thousands of pages printed with one line of indecipherable code each, usually lots of smiley faces and wing-dings). You can get this if the driver is configured for a different print emulation than the printer. You can also get this if the header portion of the document is corrupt. If the printer cannot determine the correct print emulation to use it will just print each line of raw code on a page. =^..^=

[rm250motox]

Your high network traffic theory makes sense. We are running on a 100 meg network (The idiot before me made that happen.) The odd thing is that we have other non kyocera printers on the network that never seem to have any issue. I am tending to lean towards the bloated nature of the kyocera drivers causing the problem. If the network is busy, the entire driver does not get downloaded to the client when a user tries to print.
We are also running into situations where a user will print and the job will not come out at the copier even though it looked like a successful print job on the client machine. When this occurs you can look in the event log on the print server and it will say the proper number of pages for the job but will say 0 for the byte size of it.

Any other ideas?

[blackcat4866]

Have you tried the simplest thing? Bypass the server completely. Load a local driver on each workstation, and set the port to the printers IP. If you have a particular department that is having a lot of trouble this will ease the pressure for a quick fix.

I don't claim to be any kind of network specialist, but I had one of my customers IT guy explain to me that server 2003 has some kind of physical limit to how many clients it will support. Once it gets near it's limit you'll see symptoms like you describe. Sorry, I don't remember the number. In the end, this customer just loaded local drivers. Problem solved. =^..^=

[rm250motox]

Yes I have bypassed the server completely. Loading the drivers locally works perfectly. This however is not the route I want to go. Local print drivers make management a nightmare.
I'm not sure about a user limit with 2003. I do know that there is one if you use XP to serve.
The only thing I have not tried is running everything off a 2008 server.
The thing that baffles me the most is that other makes of printer work fine...

[dogg_man]

Please forgive me for tossing this out there but.

1. What kind of port are you using to print to the copier/s? Standard TCP IP?
2. Make sure you are using the correct print driver.
A while back I had a similar issue that you are having, turned out the tech installed the wrong driver, he did something like a 2332 for a 2532 so double check the drivers.
3. Does it drop off the network for everyone or just a few?
If its just a few then it could be a security issue.
4. You mention that your users have the basic view of the driver.
I had a customer who had this, turned out because they had 4 copiers of the same model, we had to rename the printers and the share name of each of the printers. And I mean called them somethings like Lunch_room_copier.
5. Make sure that your users have the rights to install the printer.
I had one specific install which the security was so tight that they could initially install the printer but once they shutdown they would go away. We had to add them using an admin account on each PC. There were only 20 so no biggy on our part.

[jmaister]

Can you ping the device when its offline?

"tracert" the IP to see where the packets hit before reaching destination.

When its not working, put Wireshark on the workstation and see what it says.


edit: did you add the additional KM driver in the script?