Unique networked printer problem.

tog435

Alright. To start, this is an enterprise level network at a small office (~30 people).
Cisco routers, VPN, Dell servers. Windows 2003 Server (Active directory). Clients are a mix of WinXP and Win2000. Both problematic workstations are Win2000.
The target printer is a HP 4345MFP.
It's shared both through a HP4250 print server and the file server rack.

Every workstation can print to it fine except two. They print blank pages. the print and file servers are both using the PCL6 driver. I installed the HP Universal Print Driver (PCL 5) and used that to add the printer, and it worked... But every morning it reprints the entire last day of print jobs from those two machines (Which in some cases can be several thousand sheets)... Clearly unacceptable, so I uninstalled those - Problem being I can't back the fileserver up to PCL5/5e drivers, and can't install unique drivers for that workstation serverside...

I'm a bit stuck, and would appreciate any help rendered.

-TOG

mtrox

Shoot Tog. I had that exact one about 3 years ago. Exact same one with a networked HP printer. What happened was that jobs would print during the day, then later the next morning....just some jobs from some computers would reprint. I don't remember if it was Win 2K's, but at that time the office had a few so that may have been the case.

What I found was that the queue never emptied on the affected work stations. Then the next morning all those jobs in the queue started printing again as soon as the user booted up and logged on again. I spent a lot of time on the phone with HP and finally found someone who knew the problem. All I did was uncheck the "enable bi-directional printing" box in the driver on the server. It was magic. Problem solved.

Here's an HP article that talks about it. According to this article, you disable bi-directional on the workstations. It's been about three years so maybe my memory is foggy, but I think I just did it on the server print driver. Play with it, you'll get it.

tog435

What a bizzarre little problem. Thanks a bunch mtrox, we shall see if that fixes the problem later today/tomorrow.

::crosses fingers::

-TOG

mtrox

tog435 wrote:

What a bizzarre little problem. Thanks a bunch mtrox, we shall see if that fixes the problem later today/tomorrow.

::crosses fingers::

-TOG

Lemme know. Hope it works. I worked that damn thing for about 4 days before I finally got the right answer. Once I got it, it was about 3 mouse clicks and the prob was solved.