Netware 5 Printing Problems

[furyzone]

We are using Netware 5 and NDPS Printing. Recently whenever large print jobs have been submitted (especially Autocad prints) we get a &quot;Error writing to <printer_name>. A write fault occured on the Network&quot;. If at this point we hit retry, we might get a portion of the job printed or just rubbish.

A TID from Novell suggested that it might be IPX/SPX causing the problem, and if we disabled IPX and just used IPX running over IP then that would fix it. Having done this on the client, it made no difference. The workstations are all running Windows NT 4, service pack 6 and Novell Client 4.83 with ZENWORKS.

Does anybody have any ideas at all??

 

[TechNoWiz]

I have the same issue with NDPS printing. What I've found so far is that it appears to be related sub-par cabling. I've moved users to a different cable drop and it corrected the problem. We run NetWare 5.1 SP5 with all NT 4.0 clients. It also appears that NDPS requires addition resources. Increasing virtual memory on the workstation helped some with printing until I found the cabling issue. At his time I am not 100% certain that it is cabling, since previous printing to queues over the same cable drop worked fine. Advise if you have found a different solution.

Larry
Sr. Network Administrator
stidhaml@squared.com

 

[Provogeek]

One resolution I can offer is actually what you tried in the first place; only not the client side.

You can force the NDPS manager to use IP with a command line switch (

http://support.novell.com)

or you can ensure IP is the first protocol to load.

To know what the first protocol to load is, type CONFIG at your server console. The first protocol to list is the first protocol to load. You can edit the ETC\NETINFO.CFG file to reorder the protocol load order. It can be tricky, if ya screw it up you screw up your network settings and have to redo it, so make a backup. The file is what INETCFG edits and what INITSYS.NCF loads on boot. It is just text, and easy to figure out if your familure with scripting or programming. Be sure to edit the NETINFO.CHK file and change what ever number is there to 0. You will notice the number in the file will match the byte count of the NETINFO.CFG file, lets you know if someone messed with the file. Brent Schmidt CNE, Network +
Senior Network Engineer
provogeek@hotmail.com
East Bay, California; USA