I can still ping the printers but with having several on the network I'm not sure which one
is causing the problem.It my be more than one!
All ip's are correct.
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The Print spooler was unable to connect to your printer
Hello,
We have a W2k server setup as print server. We have both Cannon and Hp printer setup on it.
We keep getting a pop up message saying
“The Print spooler was unable to connect to your printer. This is caused by your printer being turned off, the cable being unplugged, or being connected to a VPN, which will block your access to your local network.
Your Document will print when the printer becomes available”
This stops all the prints until we click the ok button.
I've had a quick search and found a solution which suggested giving all the HP's a fixed IP and renaming them which I have done but still get the message.
There is nothing in the event logs.
Some of the HP's are connected by jet direct boxes and others with built in network cards.
Any ideas???
Cheers
Hurel
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Answers
We do experiance problem exactly as described above. When the printer gets powered off for any reason we get the popup message:
“The Print spooler was unable to connect to your printer. This is caused by your printer being turned off, the cable being unplugged, or being connected to a VPN, which will block your access to your local network. Your Document will print when the printer becomes available”
The printer queue shows status OFF Line - when the power gets turned back on status will eventually (after approx 20 seconds) show READY - but nothing will print until the OK button is pressed.
Any ideas?
The event viewer does not show any errors but I can find the printer which causes the problem by pinging it. Once the printer is back online and the message is answered then everything does return to normal.
This problem seem to have only started recently and may be due to installing printers with jetdirect boxes using a newer version of the jetdirect installation software but this is only my best guess!
Has anyone come accross a solution?
Upgrading to W2K3 is a last resort if there is no other fix.
In our case it is every printer that will cause the problem , and yes there is no indication of any sort in event viewer.
I did some testing and it seems that the issue may be related to the type of port that is used by the printer.
We are using HP Standard TCP/IP ports in general - if I switch the port to be Microsoft's provided Standard TCP/IP Port the issue seems to be resolved.
There is an error message that pops up stating that there was an error while printing the document, but it disappears as soon as the printer is available again, and the print job gets printed.
As I understand printing is slower using Standard TCP/IP ports as opposed to using HP Standard TCP/IP ports.
I can not confirm, but it is possible that the problem started when we installed the newest HP Printer Installation Wizard software that must have updated HP Standard TCP/IP ports to newest version on the Win2k Print server.
As I mentioned before it does not seem to affect Win2003 server.
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by: scougourdanPosted on 2005-09-02 at 14:02:42ID: 14813543
do you ping printers devices ? if not, print test page from device to verify IP config
do you telnet hp jetdirects boxes?
try to configure your printers with LPR ports and not with standard tcp ip ports.