Error on server crashing Printer 1

[sewoodford]

have a customer on windows 2000 server service pack 3 with Metaframe XP feature release 3. I have print notification off. They are printing to an OKidata 320T attached to an HP Jet direct 500x print server.

When they print to the printer about 95% of the time it works as it should. The other 5% of the time it gives an error in event log that says 'There was an error printing to Printer x (10.0.0.111) Retry or Cancel. However by the time they get to the server and get it logged in the error message is gone. Then the only way to get the printer going is to restart the spooler.

In CTX631387 it states that this should not happen on network printers. See Below:

NOTE: Under Windows NT Terminal Server with MetaFrame 1.x, if the print notification is turned off and the printer is directly connected by means of a parallel or serial cable, error messages will appear on the server. While the error is displayed, printing will not resume to the printer even if the cause of the error is cleared from the printer. You must log on to the server and click Retry or Cancel in the Error Message dialog box. This does not affect network-connected printers.


I need to Know how to make this error stop. We are getting close to their busy time and having to wait on me to connect and restart the spooler is not a good game plan.

I also tried to schedule a restart of the print spooler on an hourly interval and it caused more problems than it solved.

Please advise on a logical next step or if it is possible to stop all printer errors from displaying on bothe workstations and Servers, Or if there is a retry command I can adjust that will automatically do the retry instead of sending the error to the server.

Thanks
Sheri

 

[BeerGood]

Save the following as a text file named FixPrint.reg, and then click on it from the server console and import the settings. Obviously, if it breaks anything you own both halves so don't blame me, you do at own risk, etc etc .... ;-)


REGEDIT4

;Disable Dr Watson
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\AeDebug]
"Debugger"=""

;Disable the Alerter service
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Alerter]
"Start"=dword:00000004

;Disable logging of print events to the System log. By default NT logs all
;print events to the System Log. On an active server, this can fill your
;System Log quickly. Setting this registry key will disable this behavior.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Providers]
"EventLog"=dword:00000000

;Disable printer beep. One more unnecessary action/process. Disable it to reduce
;bandwidth/increase performance.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\]
"BeepEnabled"=dword:00000000

;Suppress spooler error Messages. Sometimes the spooler service will refuse to restart
;after a shutdown, giving a ‘system error 12’. Most likely cause- unanswered printer
;error popup on the console of the server. Disabling these error messages can make the
;restart more reliable.
;Change the value of ErrorControl from 0 (which lets all error messages
;display) to 1 (to suppress system error messages only) or 2 (to
;suppress both system error and application error messages).
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Spooler]
"ErrorControl"=dword:00000002

;Set NETPOPUP=0. In some environments, the NT print spooler notification dialog is seen
;as a nuisance. This disables that popup.
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Providers]
"NetPopup"=dword:00000000


Cheers

 

[ChuckieO]

It sounds like all users are printing directly to an IP address, i.e. the JetDirect box is responsible for queuing jobs. Implement a seperate print-server (anything but the Citrix server) and change the printers to use this instead, i.e. \\print_server\print_queue.
This way, the only source of print jobs to the JetDirect card will be from the print-server, and you will also have more queue management options.

 

[sewoodford]

BeerGood and chuckieO thanks for the responces. The 1st ones I have received on this issue for a year now. I will put in place and test on my test box before implementing.

Very Gratefull,

Sheri