Troubleshooting tips for administering printer stations

For a comprehensive discussion of strategies for troubleshooting network printing, see ``Troubleshooting printing problems''.

• Printing is slow using NPRINTER.EXE as a remote network station

  The following are possible reasons why printing might be substantially slower using NPRINTER.EXE as a remote network station than using the same printer locally from DOS:

  • You may have an IRQ conflict.

    Change to polled mode.

  • Your port may not support hardware interrupts.

    If this is the problem, use polled mode. (You can get the ability to use interrupts by installing an I/O board that supports them.)

  • You may be using the wrong type of cable or a defective cable.

    Try a new cable. Some printers require a non-standard parallel cable. They will work with a standard cable, but not effectively. Examples: IBM 4019 and 4029.

• The Message Printer is not connected Appears on the Console Screen

  This message may indicate that NPRINTER has not yet been loaded to activate a printer that has been previously defined in PCONSOLE.

• Remote serial printer self-tests successfully but is not working as network device

  Serial printers must be configured the same way as they are configured in PCONSOLE, or NetWare Administrator. The printer must be configured through its DIP switches or through menus. See your printer's documentation for details.

  The printer configurations must agree on baud rate, data bits, stop bits, XON/XOFF, and parity.

• NPRINTER.EXE does not initialize or hangs periodically at random

  Sometimes the presence of a router between the NPRINTER station and the print server can cause problems for NPRINTER, causing the printer to hang.

  A similar problem may occur when you reboot the workstation to re-establish a lost connection. In this case, you sometimes get a message telling you the printer is still in use. You see this message when the previous SPX connection has not timed out, which usually takes at least 30 seconds.

  If you have increased the SPX abort and IPX Retry counts, the time-out sequence is even longer.

  To resolve either of these problems, first make sure the following conditions have been met:

  • Your machine has sufficient memory.

  • You are running current versions of software such as NPRINTER and NetWare VLM programs.

  • The PSERVER is running.

    Attempts to start NPRINTER when PSERVER is not running will cause an error.

  If none of these is the cause of the problem, try increasing the following two parameters in your NET.CFG file:

  SPX ABORT TIMEOUT= retry_number
  IPX RETRY COUNT= retry_number
  

  SPX ABORT TIMEOUT defaults to 540 ticks or approximately 30 seconds. IPX RETRY COUNT defaults to 20 ticks, or slightly more than 1 second.

  You can also try loading NPRINTER through a batch file at the workstation. That file can include an IF statement to retry NPRINTER until PSERVER is functioning. For example:

  :LOOP
  NPRINTER pserver printernumber
  IF ERRORLEVEL 1 GOTO :LOOP
  ECHO Port driver loaded successfully.
  

• Workstation hangs when NPRINTER loads

  Sometimes NPRINTER conflicts with the network interface board settings and hangs. This problem may be caused by conflicting settings on the LAN adapter board.

  Either change to polled mode or change the board settings to avoid the conflict.

• Print jobs are ruined when printing locally

  A print job on a printer may be ruined if the user on the station to which the printer is physically attached does not have a CAPTURE invoked and attempts to print locally. To prevent this, capture LPT1 on this workstation so that NetWare handles the job.

  Another method is to reverse the ``Private'' and ``Shared'' printer options so that the printer is designated as ``Private''. This can be done at the print server console from the ``Printer Control'' option window or from the PSC command line utility.

  PSC provides the quickest way to do this. Issue the PSC ``Private'' (PRI) command from the DOS prompt. You can then issue the PSC ``Shared'' (SHA) command to reverse the status for shared network printing again.

• NPRINTER cannot reconnect to print server that was downed and loaded on different NetWare server

  If you bring down PSERVER and bring it up on a different NetWare server from the one it was originally loaded on, port drivers that were connected to that print server initially lose their connection.

  When NPRINTER is connected to PSERVER, the port driver stores the network address of the NetWare server where the print server was loaded. If the print server is then loaded on a different NetWare server, the port driver cannot attach to the print server again unless it is reattached to the new server running the print server.

  If you do not reattach the port driver, and later reload the print server on the original NetWare server, the port driver will connect as before because the network address of the NetWare server and the information stored by the port driver once again match.

• Port driver status is Waiting for Job but printer is not attached

  The port driver (NPRINTER) status for a defined but unattached serial printer is ``Waiting for job'' even though the printer is not attached, and the printer status is ``Running''. If a print job is put into the queue for this printer, the port driver status changes to ``Ready (Waiting for printer)'' or ``Printing job'' but the printer status changes to ``Offline''.

  Defined but unattached parallel printers show a status of ``Not connected''.

• NPRINTER.EXE does not run from local drive

  If you want to run NPRINTER.EXE from your local drive, be sure to copy all the necessary files.

  An alternative is to put them in the LOGIN directory on the network, which is the directory that is accessible prior to logging in. This will eliminate the security risk and user error problems that can occur from leaving a workstation logged in and not supervised.