Very Wierd Network problem (involving printers)

[Mike3d]

Hi guy's

I went on a call out today with somebody saying that none of their printers where printing so i went down there they had about 7 pc's doing the same thing.

ok so heres the problem.

whenever they / i tried to goto the printers folder be it by start -settings - printers (on some of the machines the menu continue to extend to give you a list of the printers all using Windows me) or through control panel it would freeze or just not display the folder.

so i thought ok i rebooted most of the systems, same problem

on ALL the pc's when i went to reboot them i was getting the end task windows on "spooler process" which took me to this post.

http://discussions.virtualdr.com/sho...pooler+process

in which none of them really applied to me.

i was getting a blue screen on most of them about vredirect or something similar to that.


I did actually solve this problem by turning every one of them off and rebooting them one by one
but what i want to know what caused this across the whole network as if this happens again the problem is not really fixed.

many thanx mike

[Newt]

- What operating system(s) are running?

- What protol(s) are running?

- Domain or workgroup?

- Printers directly on the network or connected to and shared thru PCs?

- If directly on the network, using a Print Server computer or some sort of device like jet direct that provides network connection?

[Mike3d]

Hi ,

The printers are connected to pc's so they was using printer sharing.

the only protocal they are using is tcp/ip

and they are running on a workgroup.

all the systems are running windows ME.

thanx for your reply mike

[Newt]

With that setup, nothing specific springs to mind.

Since it was a generalized issue, it almost had to be some sort of malformed network packets or a broadcast storm that has a side effect of locking up the spooler service.

And if it has only happened the once, possibly a stupid user trick from a single PC that did the damage. 3 or 4 big power point presentations sent to different printers in rapid succession possibly.


My only suggestions would be

- make sure the network was as fast as possible by setting the NIC speed/duplexing to the maximum the switch/hub will handle rather than using auto. If a switch, 100Mbps full-duplex. If a hub, 10Mbps half-duplex is about the fastest.

- quit spooling print jobs

- upgrade the operating systems. 2K and XP should be much more robust and less likely to fail on a network.

Maybe someone else will get a hint from this and offer a solution. Might help to say what brand of PC and printer(s) since there are known issues with some hardware. Toshiba laptops, for instance, will do some quirky things if they don't have enough free resources.

[nodular]

Hi all,

May not be the answer, but here goes.

The company I work for had the same problem about a year ago.
There was a virus that took over all the printers. Everything worked otherwise. No one could print to thier local or to the print servers.

I don't recall all the details as I wasn't working here then.

I understood it was from an email attachment that spread through the whole company in about 20 minutes through the LAN.

Don't know if this helps.

NODULAR

[Mike3d]

Nodular thanx for replying

i think all the systems have nav 2003 but i dont know if they are updating them , something to think about.

Newt,

The pc's all look custom built most of them are running k7s5a (onboard nics) motherboards most running athlon xp's etc... they bought them off us!

printers i cant really remember exactly what models they where but from what i remember most of them if not all where epson's.

"And if it has only happened the once, possibly a stupid user trick from a single PC that did the damage. 3 or 4 big power point presentations sent to different printers in rapid succession possibly."

Somebody else also said something about somebody getting print click happy pressing if a few times that it would overload the printer making it stop responding but the pc's where still sending data making the network slow.

got a lot of things to look at here.

thanx all for reply's mike