Elusive Network Printing Issue

[mmikelas 0]

NT 4.0 Server with approximately 100 9x clients. The print server is set up with only about 6 printers...mix of HP, Cannon, Xerox...

 

All of a sudden, all users on the network when attempting to print to any of the printers receive a "Unable to connect to \\prnsrv due to an unknown system error". The print job gets placed in the local queue, but the printer is then marked as "offline". Sometimes, you can go in, highlight the jobs, click on Use Printer Offline and they'll process. Other times, you have to reboot the client machine.

 

This occurs probably 5 out of 7 times on any given client machine during peak or off-peak network usage.

 

I've exhaustively searched the Knowledge Base and cant come up with anything...though I continually find references to problems with HP JetAdmin software and port monitoring. But if we remove that software and try to move the printers to LPR ports...all the jobs queued to HP printers print, but then remain in the print queue.

 

Could we have a corrupt spoolss.exe, are there other issues. etc.?

 

I'm open to ANY suggestion at this point.

 

Regards,

-Mike

[clutch 1]

Have you tried restarting the print spooler on the server, or just rebooting the server? What service pack are you on? I have seen stalled print spoolers in NT before and sometimes restarting the service doesn't help. Once rebooted, the problem is gone.

[mmikelas 0]

We've stopped/started the service, rebooted the machine...just about everything. We're only on SP4...I'd like to move to SP6a, but the the overall IS Manager wanted to review the pros/cons before making the move. Prior to this issue, the network has been rock solid stable.

 

-Mike

[AndyFair 0]

Have you checked disk space on the partition that contains \WINNT? If there isn't enough space on this disk, files will not spool, but users won't get any sensible errors...

 

AndyF

[mmikelas 0]

Yeah, and I even moved the spool folder to a partition with 2.0 GIG free. I dumped JetAdmin today and the situation improved somewhat, but it's still sporadic and by no means stable yet.