Thermal Printer Setup? Problem

[Tracey]

I have, and have had for years, thermal printers from Zebra hooked to either a 10.20 or now my 11.0 system. I currently have 6 of them configured and 5 of them that print up to 10-15 labels at a time, works beautifully. I have the last one that prints anywhere from 100 to 500 labels at one time (file size is around 33000) we have ben experiencing problems with this one.

It will print out around 150 sequential labels, and then starts over from 1, gets to about 150 again, then starts all over at 1 again.

I am beleiving it is a problem with memory on the Zebra printer, but I wanted to check to see if anyone else has experienced this and it was the fault of the HP side?

I go through jetadmin to set it up as a network printer, but since it is not on a jetdirect card, I have to set it up as a "dumbplot_printer", and connection type as "other".

Thanks for any ideas!

Tracey

[Victor_5]

Hi Tracey:

I used this kind of printer before, it also troubled me a lot.

We were using the printer connected with external HP JetDirect card, set it up as a remote printer. Here are some points in my mind you can check:

1. the firmware of printer
2. the switch of printer
3. the switch of JetDirect
4. the printer cable

Try ask HP or Zebra, but I found it did not help a lot, or try to connect your printer as local printer and see what is happening, hope it can helps. Good luck!

[Tracey]

Firmware is something I hadn't thought of, thanks I will check it out. We initially thought about memory, but the files are relitively small.

Any more ideas or thoughts are appreciated!

Tracey

[Sandip Ghosh]

If it is connected through network, telnet to the printer and look for the tcp idle time. Try to increase the TCP idle time.

Sandip

[MANOJ SRIVASTAVA]

Hi Tracey

I dont think there should problems on the nix Side but still you can try stuff like increasing buffer size on the Zebra Printer , or print speed something that would free up the memory soon. Infact in case you would like you can try using differnt driver , which is printer specific .

Also since it is more of intensive printing is there a way you can just dump it in a PC and print it using a PC .


Manoj Srivastava

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

This is a common problem with JetDirect software. When a networking error occurs, a simple handshake tries to get things going, and if this fails, the job is restarted from the beginning. You can trace the handshake operation with the debug option in lp

lp -dMyPrinter -o hpnpflog some_file_to_print

or you can use hpnpf to print directly:

/opt/hpnp/bin/hpnpf -x 12.34.56.78 -N -R file_to_print

The end of the logfile will contain the failure information (most likely a network communication problem).

[Tracey]

From the loggin Bill mentioned I was able to tell that the zebra's buffer size is 4096 bytes. It was buffering several times, then failing. After it failed, it would resubmitt itself. We are ordering more memory.

Thanks!

Tracey

[Francois Bariselle_3]

Hi,

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Let's go !!!

Frank.