Printing problem with print server connected to W2003 server

[Leonard MOR]

We have a LaserJet 1500L printer (Q3015A) shared over the network via a JetDirect 153x print server (J6035C).

If the stations on the net access the printer directly on the TCP/IP address of the JetDirect server, printing works fine.

However, if they used shared printing via the W2003 server, only the left half of the page is printed (as though a wrong sized page was configured). The server can not print correctly either. Am using the same latest printer driver on the 2003 server and the W2K Pro stations.

In fact HP technical support in France initially diagnosed a hardware printer problem, and the printer had already been changed. But I realise know that it seems to be related to the Windows 2003 server.

Occasionally the printers available on a particular station disappear. This seems to happen when a user selects the shared LaserJet 1500l printer then comes back to the local default printer. Users need to reboot the machine, and printers, like magic, reappear.

Any help gratefully received.

[Stephen Grimmer]

As a troubleshooting step... try installing a generic text only driver for that printer. See if the print is ok. That would narrow it down to a pure driver issue.

[Rune J. Winje]

It's a while since I've configured JetDirect cards/boxes, but I think there is something called job timeout.

You can try increasing that, because if the print job takes long breaks in the middle, then the print server only waits that amount of seconds before truncating the job.

Other things to look into are printer driver settings (i.e. spool entire job to disk before printing -> will also fix timeout problems).

Also the video driver is important when printing as the printer driver basically asks the video-card "hey, what's on the screen".

This is especially important if the driver (default or on the clients) is set up to use EMF (enhanced meta file) which is basically a "half-chewed" format which the server then has to render with the printer/video driver before sending to the printer. (CPU intensive) If the clients produce a type "raw" printer stream, the server only needs to transport that to the printer in contrast as it is the finished printer file.

Printing to a .prn file and copying that file to a locally connected printer is a good place to start as it will eliminate network and timeout issues.

Check also that the spooler directory is on a disk with enough space. (Printer folder, File - Server properties)

Lastly check if you've got the latest firmware for the JD print server.


Cheers,
Rune