Slow Print on First Attempt

[kdeans]

Netware 4.11 SP 9
I have a problem whereby all or most of my users experience a pronounced delay in the first print job of the day. All subsequent print jobs are pretty quick. It does not matter what make of printer they are using (HP, IBM, etc). Client version does not make a difference. If they reboot during the day, the same thing happens. I'm thinking that it is related to IPX as they have no speed problem printing through an AS400 to an IP printer. Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[salserocito]

With the assumption that this is NetWare v4.11 or v4.2, do the Print Queues that the Users are printing to reside on the same server that they authenticate to for resources like their HOME/USER and Shared Directories.

With NDS, NetWare creates an Authenticated Connection, as well as a Physical Connection to Servers. The Authenticated Connection is created only once. This is the connection that you will see in MONITOR with a * next to it. Any other connection without a * is considered a Physical connection for the purpose of gaining access to a Resource, such as a Directory, application, OR A PRINTER!!!

Its my guess that maybe the Print Queue resides on a different Server and the Users are having a delay because a new physical connection has to be made to the Server.

Good Luck.

 

[kdeans]

Yes, the Print Queues reside on the SYS Volume of the same server that all users authenticate to. It is basically a one server system. Another Novell server is used as a mail gateway and for dialup users but only carries a two user license. This is only a recent phenomena and may have coincided with the replacement of hubs for switches. We run spantree portfast on all the Cisco Switch ports that are end nodes (printers, workstations, etc.) and not cascaded to further hubs or switches.

 

[SuperDaveDCF]

Do you know the setting of the switches prior to the swap? We've been disabling spanning tree.

 

[kdeans]

I'm not sure what the default setting is prior to enabling portfast. I think it is just considered FastEthernet. With the non portfast setting we had a number of problems including printers not able to sense the network number, workstations timing out before they could renew a DHCP address, etc. This was due to the fact that each time a switch was addreesed, there would be a certain amount of negotiation to ensure that there were no loops to this network. By turning on portfast on all switch ports that are leaf nodes, we ended this negotiation. We didn't turn on portfast on any switch port that may daisy chain to another switch or hub.