LaserJet 5simx hesitating when printing

[arobart]

We are using the above printer on our Novell/Unix network,but using tcp/ip for printing. Up until yesterday I haven't had any problems except the occasional Adobe file (with a lot of graphics) that would print a couple pages, hesitate, then print a couple more, etc.
All of a sudden my invoices from the Unix server are doing the same thing. These are all queued in cron and run at night, but because there are so many the last 2 days of the month, we always tend to run out of paper. Usually, no big deal, I come in and put paper in the tray in the morning and they finish printing. But the last 2 days when I've done that, they've printed 2 invoices, hestitated for 10-15 seconds, then printed 2 more, etc. Needless to say, it took forever to finish printing the invoices. I haven't made any changes to the Unix server or network and the reports I ran next off the server ran fine. Does anyone have an idea where I should begin looking?
Thanks in advance!

 

[jlasman]

Try power cycling the printer and see what happens.


Jim Asman

 

[arobart]

Nothing changed, same thing

 

[jgideon]

you said novell/unix, so this probably doesn't apply, but lpr services in Windows have a 'default' limit to the number of ports they'll allow to be used within a give time period. (each job uses a different IP port, and windows only allows a rotation of 10, so the timeout has to expire before it reuses those 10...) not sure if something similar comes in to play in your configuration. I seem to recall that installing a service pack on our nt boxes broke the fix we had for it once...

 

[arobart]

I just don't know what could have happened, we've been running this configuration for years and have never had this problem!