printer peculiarity/printcodes question

[Bob Rasmussen]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2004, Jeremy Anderson wrote:

> I'm having a rather interesting thing happen with an lj4100mfp (using the 4050
> printcodes).  When a single job is submitted (a rather large job, say 300
> single-page forms) just once, the printer runs off three copies.
> We have verified that the job is spooling up just once.  I have also verified
> that the printer is not set to make multiple copies of each print job.
> ...

It's time for a classic divide-and-conquer approach. Configure the server
to print the report to a file. Then you can do a number of things to
determine if the problem is in a) the file, b) the printer itself, or c)
the delivery mechanism from server to printer. For instance:

1. Print the file from a shell prompt, with an lp or lpr command.

2. Move the file to a Windows PC and sen d it to the printer from there.

3. Send it to a different printer if possible. If you don't have one, and
the data in the file is not sensitive, send it to me and I'll try it. I
can also look at the PCL codes.

4. Try hooking the printer up a different way. You haven't told us what
kind of connection you have between server and printer. If it's network,
try hooking up with a direct parallel connection.

5. Post a hex-dump of the first 500 bytes of the file. If there's anything
in the file that would tell the printer to print multiple jobs, it would
be at the beginning of the file.

My best guess is that there is a problem in the despooling process,
possibly onvolving a network connection, such that the despooler thinks
the job is failing and is therefore resenting it.

Regards,
....Bob Rasmussen,   President,   Rasmussen Software, Inc.

personal e-mail: ras at anzio.com
 company e-mail: rsi at anzio.com
          voice: (US) 503-624-0360 (9:00-6:00 Pacific Time)
            fax: (US) 503-624-0760
            web: http://www.anzio.com