Adding Standard TCP/IP Printer Ports

[edeades]

I am looking for some insight to an annoying problem we have when adding local standard tcp/ip printer ports to a workstation. We are a HP shop with all HP LaserJet printers with JetDirect cards, mostly the 2400 and 4200 family. Before when adding a standard tcp/ip port and typing in the ip address of the printer and clicking next, it would automatically find the HP JetDirect card in the wizard. Now, everytime after entering the ip address of the printer it waits for a long time and comes back with Generic Network Card. If I manually choose HP JetDirect from the list and continue, printing works fine. It is just an annoyance on the amount of time it takes to not find the HP JetDirect and then after choosing the HP JetDirect until it get to printer driver selection. I hope this makes sense and hopefully someone else has had this annoying problem. I have tried searching Google extensively for this problem and have no luck finding results for what I am looking for. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!

 

[edfair]

What is there between the computer and the printer?

And I would be curious if pinging the address before attempting to add it would affect the failure.



Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[edeades]

Thanks for your response. Between the computer and printer is a switch. We have an external firewall but nothing internally. We have a router as well for our WAN. I started a continous ping on the printer IP address before starting the printer wizard. I had the same results. It does not fail, I can manually choose the HP JetDirect and it works fine. It just takes an extra 5 or so minutes per workstation to add a new ip printer port and printer. Just annoying.

 

[edfair]

Yeah, I understand. Haven't used a Jetdirect so haven't run into the problem.

Would be curious if net use would get it up faster. Haven't done it, but a possibility.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[edeades]

Not sure what you mean by using net use on adding a printer port. I am familiar with using the net use command for shared printers. The JetDirect is just the NIC in all of our HP printers. Could it have anything to do with SNMP? Or something to that effect?