intermittent printer pings

[ozydave]

We have windows 2003 print server and all xp clients.

The printers are a mix hp and Kyocera plus a few others for good measure.

On Friday, just gone, a few printer started to have problems, staff / students could not print to them.

We did have one student creating a loop in the network but ‘spanning tree’ and a quick execution took care of that. The printer were having problems before the loop

This happened school wide. Now everybody is off I’m sat here trying to work it out.

Not all printers are affected, it’s not limited to one make of printer. When I try and ping the affected printers I get a slow intermittent response.

There is no network traffic as every one is off and only one or two PC’s still left on, no errors on any switches. Still having the same problem.

I have tried completely removing one of the printers from the server and reinstall it same problem

Anybody have any thoughts.

I’m thinking of making a backup using Microsoft print migratory, removing the print server roll, restart the server, reinstall the server roll and restore the backup.

I know I could change it another server but I would then have to go round and allocate the relevant printer to the relevant member of staff when they get back.

 

Cheers

Dave

[SYNACK]

If slow pings are the problem it sounds more like an issue with the network stack on the printers rather than a server issue. Perhaps the network server bits on those particular printers got a bit confused with the broadcast storm from the loopback and have not recovered.

 

Have you tried switching off the printers for a vouple of minutes to clear their working memory. I would also try upgrading the firmware on the printers if a new one is avalible and possibly wipeing the configuration to factory and reconfiguring it then testing the network connectivity again.

[Ric_]

I'd also recommend power cycling your switches - some of the 'less nice' switches can sometimes 'fill up' with addresses for some reason. I remember a couple of 3COM switches where I used to work which needed power cycling at least once a week or they stopped talking to Realtek NICs!