Print Job Continuously Restarts Spooling But Never Prints

• Microsoft Windows NT Workstation versions 3.51, 4.0
• Microsoft Windows NT Server versions 3.51, 4.0

SYMPTOMS

When you print to a line printer remote (LPR) printer port from Windows NT, print jobs may not print, and you may experience the following symptoms:

• The print job may appear to spool, then restart and spool from the beginning. This behavior continues until it is cancelled.



• The print job hangs in the queue with an error status.



• The print job hangs in the queue with a spooling status

CAUSE

This is caused by the idle-timeout setting on the printer's TCP/IP settings being set too low. The default setting is 90 seconds. When this value is set to an extremely low number, such as 1, the printer will respond to the computer sending the print job with a frame size of zero. This can be seen in a network trace by checking the Window setting in the TCP portion of the printer's acknowledgement frame. That number is the largest frame size the printer will accept.

RESOLUTION

Increase the TCP/IP idle-timeout setting using the printer's control panel or by using a telnet session. The default setting is 90.

Consult your JetDirect manual for information on how to make this change. If the setting is low enough to cause this problem, it may be extremely difficult to use a telnet session to make the change, since the session will constantly time-out before the commands can be entered.

MORE INFORMATION

The different symptoms appear according to how the printer responds. If the printer responds with a zero Window size but does not include the Reset flag, the server will hang in an error state until the printer responds with a larger window size. In the trace you can see the server retrying the connection, and the printer responding with an acknowledgement, but still with the zero Window size.

If the printer responds with a zero Window size, but does not include the reset flag, the server will re-spool the job and try again from the beginning. In the printer window, the job will spool to its full size, sit for a moment, then start spooling over again, until it is canceled.

Additional query words: hung

Keywords : kb3rdparty kbprint ntprint NTSrvWkst
Version : WinNT:3.51,4.0
Platform : winnt
Issue type : kbprb