Wierd Printing issues across a VPN

[allenherring]

If someone can answer this I'll buy them a six pack!

Here's the situation:
Our office, in Baton Rouge, has a full T-1 with a Cisco 1700 series router. We have a VPN connection to another office, in Atlanta, but I don't know what type of connection they have. The citrix server is in Atlanta and we connect to it to run one program. I have loaded the latest citrix client on our workstations and i have loaded the print drivers that the Atlanta office told me to use so our clients could print to thier locally connected printers. We only have 7 or 8 people who connect to Atlanta at any given time. All of our clients are using either HP2100's or HP2200's connected via USB or LPT1. Our clients print out reports from citrix. Some of the reports may be very long, up to 20 or 30 pages. I ran this test yeaterday:

Workstation 1 pirnted 19 page report in 54 minutes and print queue showed 34MB when done.

Workstation 2 printed SAME 19 page report in 8 minutes and print queue showed 11MB when done.

This problem is random and it happens on a daily basis. I have monitored our bandwidth and we are only using about 15% of it on average. The IT staff in Atlanta are a bunch of assholes and blame everything on our network.
Anyone got any ideas?

Allen Herring
Network Administrator

 

[JohnTcolo]

Is there anything in the event logs on the Citrix server? Are both printers set up exactly alike? Check the properties and see if they are spooling alike, etc. I might rerun the test on the slower machine and print directly, don't spool.

Finally, were you logged in as the same user on both workstations? You need to be to eliminate any possible profile issues.

Good luck.

 

[allenherring]

Is there anything in the event logs on the Citrix server?
I don't have access to the citrix server in Atlanta and the IT staff over there are jerks about this whole sitiuation.

Are both printers set up exactly alike?
Yes

Check the properties and see if they are spooling alike, etc. I might rerun the test on the slower machine and print directly, don't spool.
The properties for both printers are the same. I'll test printing directly versus spooling and reply.

Finally, were you logged in as the same user on both workstations? You need to be to eliminate any possible profile issues.
I don't think there is an issue with profiles because this problems seems to move around and affect all users at different times.

I will continue to work on this....

Allen

 

[JohnTcolo]

Good luck, I assume the operating systems are identical and have had Windows Update ran the same? We had problems here with XP Pro performing poorly in our network until we put Service Pack 1 on.

 

[xs4citrix]

Do you use autocreated or normal network printers?
If autocreated, do you use the UPD, or native drivers?
What FR/SP level is your server, and what citrixclient version are you using?

http://www.printingsupport.com

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