For those of you just enter the IT 'biz, let me assure you that Hewlett Packard was once a great company. Good, reliable printers. Functional Drivers. Not the crap we are handed today. It is always sad to see a reliable company start to tube and I can only hope that this is a quirk, but I once again ran into an issue with their drivers.

We are using their Universal Print Driver because they have not come out with the necessary drivers for Windows 2008 for our printers (not to mention the issue with their bidirectional channel component) and came across a rather strange bug. Let us say that we are trying to print the following document from Word 2007 that has a watermark. It should look like this:

However, when printed from an XP machine we only get half the letters. It looks like this:

I verify that there are no correct drivers from HP (nope!) and then I try changing a setting - maybe "Send Truetype as Bitmap". Wow! Now we have the other letters, we just dropped most of the original ones that were showing.

So I roll back the driver from PCL6 (v 5.0) to PCL5 (v 5.0). And guess what. It works. PCL 5 works where PCL 6 does not.

A little (true) story. I was about to fly out of town so I took my wife's car into an oil-change place just to get that task done. While there the tech pointed out that the alternator belt was missing a tooth. Now I have changed more alternator belts in my life than you can shake a stick at, and I should know better than to have an oil-change place change my belts, but since I was in a hurry I figured to let them do it for me this time.

Oops.

When I get back I find out that it is squealing when you start the car. Hmm, maybe they need to tighten it. I take it back and they can't repair it. It works on tensioning pulleys in that car and they tell me they think that one of the pulleys is broken. So I take it to the dealer to fix. The rep sits down next me after they have loaded the car up and taken a look and says, "Well, it is kind of good news. The pulleys aren't broken, they simply put on the wrong belt - it is too large."

It seems to me that these "Universal" print drivers from HP fall into that category. What use is a functional engine if the belts that you put on it do not fit.

Come on, HP, spend some time on the belts. Please.

I just have to share this story to highlight the curiosities caused by supporting users.

A couple of days ago I received a distress call because someone's printer (let's call her "Mary") was asking for cardstock. Knowing what the problem was - look here - I went up and removed/readded her printer. That brought down all the settings from the print server and she was good to go (after she closed out of programs that were holding the old settings). Printing proceeded perfectly.

Today I got a call about the same person having printing issues. But not from her. I will refer to the person who called initially as "Jackie".

*ring*

Me: "Hello, this is Matt."
Jackie: "Mary is having trouble printing again."
Me: "Is Mary there?"
Jackie: "Yes."
Me: "Then why isn't Mary calling me?"
Jackie: "She asked me to call."
Me: "Have Mary call me."

*ring*

Me: "Hello, this is Matt."
Mary: "I am having trouble printing again."

I then proceed, over the phone, to walk her through checking her printer's settings, specifically what the 'Paper Type' is. Everything is perfect. Except that it won't print. I have her try printing from Notepad, no go. I check on the server and there is definitely a backup. So I jog on up there to take a looksee. When I arrive, Mary is kicking back reading the paper. I walk over to her computer and verify, again, that everything is perfect.

Strange...

I walk over to the printer. There, emblazoned on the informational screen, is this message -> "Manually Feed Envelope". I manually feed an envelope. It prints an envelope and then ALL Mary's stuff starts to spew forth...

Jackie: "Oh, that was that envelope that you asked it to print, Mary."

Ironically I am sure that the word will get around that "we are still having printer problems." Ah well, you need to have thick skin if you are going to work in IT. And, of course, I got quite a chuckle at the thought that Jackie had to call for Mary.

We moved to our w08 print server and as noted in yesterday's post ran into issues with slooooooooooooooooow printing. These were resolved by moving to the Universal Print Driver (UPD) which had an updated bidirectional channel portion. There was one surprising result of the move - all of a sudden people were being prompted to load a type of paper (recycled, heavy-weight, glossy) into the Manual Feed tray on the 4250s. If they hit the continue button (the checkmark) it would print, but they had to do it FOR EVERY PAGE.

Not something to make your end users happy.

The issue appears to be a rather odd interaction with the driver in which it sets modifies the default settings of the printer. To fix:

1 - Open up the printer properties on the Print Server and go to the Advanced Tab. Selecting "Printer Defaults"



2 - Go to the Paper/Quality tab and look at the Paper type. It is probably set at a specific (undesired) type.



3 - Click on the Paper type and select "Unspecified"



A couple of notes:

1. Users may need to remove/add the printer back for this to get pushed down.
2. This is NOT Printing Preferences. The same screens are there, but they will not fix this, although they should be changed as well.
   

If you have moved to Windows 2008 for your Print Server and have encountered slow printing to your HP Laserjets, the issue may be the driver.

According to this support document by HP the issue lies in the HP Bidirectional Channel component - namely hpzbid.dll and hpzbidXX.msi). You can read all about the symptoms/cause there but to make a long story short it appears that this lies with issues where it continually tries to reinstall the .dll and fails.

The solution, according to HP, is NOT to call up and get updated .dlls (they probably will not give them to you) but to use their updated Universal Print Driver (UPD) version 5.0. This changes the .dll to cioum.dll for the bidirectional channel control rather than hpzbid.dll. HP has no intention of updating hpzbid.dll so get used to it.

The symptoms are hard to miss (for example it takes 30 seconds just to view the properties of a printer on a client machine) so this one should not be hard to miss. Just remember to use the 5.0 version of the UPD.

Printers noted by HP:

• Laserjet 4250 series
• Laserjet 4350 series
• Laserjet 9040 series
• Laserjet 9050 series
• Laserjet 5200 series
• Laserjet P3005 series
  

After installing our clustered w08 Print Server I noticed that there was a particular Warning in the System Log. Event ID 4 "The print spooler failed to reopen an existing printer connection because it could not read the configuration information from the registry key S-1-5-18\Printers\Connections. The print spooler could not open the registry key. This can occur if the registry key is corrupt or missing, or if the registry recently became unavailable."

I looked in the registry and, no surprise, that key was missing. I hunted around a bit and found this entry. Basically to resolve this was fairly simple - add the key back in:

1. Open up the registry on the computer (I did it on all nodes individually)
2. Go to HKEY_USERS/S-1-5-18/Printers
3. Add a new Key called "Connections" (no quotes)
4. Right-click and select Permissions on the new key to verify that System has "Full Control"

Now I am not sure if this is an issue with Clustering or just a strange whacky event that happened. But if it happens to you, hopefully this will resolve it.

I am moving our old windows 2003 clustered file share over to a brand, spanking new w08 clustered file share. There are things to note about the differences (another name, another IP???) but the thing I want to note about today had to do with one of our Multi-Function Printers, specifically the HP 8060.

We have that beast setup so that staff can scan documents and it gets sent to our public folder where they can get it. I guess when it was setup they were having trouble with specifying the network share and so my cohorts were advised to use the IP address of the share ->
\\10.10.10.10\public\scanner\folder.

This worked.

HOWEVER............

There always seems to be something that throws a wrench in the works and the wrench in this case is that in w08 you CAN NOT get to a share via IP address, but only by the name of the server. Let me state that again:

\\myserver\myshare\myfolder appears
\\10.10.10.10\myshare\myfolder does not

It seems that in w08 clustered file shares do not share on IP addresses. I have not mucked with this to see if there is a way around it, but out of the box there is no way to get to a shared folder via IP address. This, of course, means that the HP 8060 is throwing a hissy fit.

I was poking around in the Networking settings for the printer when I noticed that under the TCP/IP settings, in the Network Identification tab there was no entry for the DNS Suffixes. So I added our domain extension (ourdomain.com) and it worked!

Just to note, I had previously tried mapping \\myserver.ourdomain.com\myshare\myfolder on the printer and that did not work, but this did.

Hope that helps...
m