Printer does not work anymore

[Art Wiens]

I would also recommend going to DCPS v2.5. They added more support for more printers. It's a painless upgrade, depending on your cpu ... a few minutes.

Check the release notes for v2.5 for your family of printers, it might be supported now.

BTW, I don't it's actually been mentioned what type of printer you have. What is it?

Cheers,
Art

[Rene Stanger]

Hello,

the MFP they have installed, is a LANIER LD245. On the inside it schould be some Ricoh model, but because the LANIER LD245 is brand new, the handbook (from Ricoh) does not state, which Ricoh model is similar.

Thanks
René

[Bojan Nemec]

Rene,

When I have problems with printers (TCPIP or LAT) I try to go by steps. First try if the connection works. In yours case telnet is yours friend:

$ TELNET printer_ip_address printer_ip_port

If you get errors after this command, you know that you have something wrong in the communication.
Else try to type something end with (form feed). The contents you typed must be printed.
Only after completing this tests OK proceed with a queue.

Bojan

[Rene Stanger]

Thanks Bojan,

I just tried what you proposed. Telnet Connection is ok. I typed something, including ctrl/L, after I excited the telnet session (the escape sequence was hard to find) the MFP started to print my pages.

With all the tries with my queues I sometimes was able to print something, but I never get an answer from the printer about completing the job or an acknowledge of the synchronisation request with standard raw_ip queues.

Any idea if I can do a similar check and establish a connection from the MFP to my OpenVMS server?

greetings
René

[Karl Rohwedder]

Have you tried to create a plain TELNETSYM or LPD queue without using DCPS?
Sinye your TELNET session prints, a TELNETSYM queue should print also.
Have you checked the printer status page, if Postscript is available and language sensing is ON?
On a Ricoh printer I was playing with, someone from remote management disabled Postscript, took me some garbage pages to find out.

regards Kalle

[Bojan Nemec]

Rene,

Most of printers and printer servers does not "talk" with the system. VMS queue symbionts does not expect any response from the printer. They just format and send the file contents to the printer. The symbiont "hangs" if the system can not send the informations (XOFF on a serial line, busy state on a paralel port or on TCPIP the printer just stops to read from the port).


(the escape sequence was hard to find)

its printed yust after the successful connection message, and by default is ^] which means


Bojan

[David Jones_21]

"Most of printers and printer servers does not "talk" with the system. VMS queue symbionts does not expect any response from the printer. They just format and send the file contents to the printer. The symbiont "hangs" if the system can not send the informations (XOFF on a serial line, busy state on a paralel port or on TCPIP the printer just stops to read from the port)."

That is generally untrue for printers using the DCPS 'rawTCP' interface. The DCPS symbiont, after connecting to port 9100, will query the status of printer and get a page count before sending the user data and get a final page count after sending the data. The printer may also send back error messages of the TCP connection which the symbiont reads.

[Rene Stanger]

Hello again,
we found the reason for my printing problem. It was a parameter in the printer config, which was reseted to default causing the printer to stop working. The datatype for postscript files may not be "binary data", it must be "TBCP". When we changed that back to TBCP the MFP worked perfectly again. Funny thing, in the DCPS manuals I tought I've read that TBCP is not valid for network printers??? But the main thing is: It works!

Thanks to everyone who gave me answers to my question.
Rene