User manual

Ethernet Trouble-shooting guide....

MAC conflicts:

You must make sure there are no MAC address conflicts between multiple Boca Printers and any other devices

on your network. Though it should never be the case, there was once an instance where two Boca Printers had

the same MAC. The printer’s MAC address is based on its serial number. Changing the printer’s serial number

might cause a problem.

Packet loss:

Determine if you are losing packets. To test for packet loss, ping the printer 1000 times. Use the ‘ping –n 1000 –

l 1472 printers IP address’ command. Let us know how many packets are lost. We have found that if a

customer is losing a lot of packets (more than 10) we may be able to improve this by shortening the internal

ribbon cable to the Ethernet card. Note: the –l 1472 parameter in the ping command tests the Maximum

Transmission Unit (MTU) of the network. It should be able to handle IP datagrams up to 1472 bytes.

LPR vs RAW TCP:

If you are having a problem using LPR mode make sure the 'byte counting enabled' option is set. Try running in

RAW TCP mode or vice versa.

Windows Driver vs Windows Socket API:

Are you using a Windows Driver or writing directly to the printer using Windows Socket API calls? Try both

approaches if possible and see if one is better than the other.

Printer Timeout issues:

Is the printer timing out during the retransmission of a packet or in an idle state? Try playing with the following

commands to see if it improves performance. The commands are explained above.

IDLE TIMEOUT COMMAND - <idt#>

RETRANSMIT TIMEOUT COMMAND - <rtt#>

Host Timeout issues:

Please refer to the following Microsoft Articles for possible solutions.

‘How to Modify the TCP/IP Maximum Retransmission Timeout’ - Article: 170359

‘TCP/IP Port Printing May Be Slow on Windows 2000’ - Article ID: 816627

‘TCP/IP and NBT configuration parameters for Windows 2000 or Windows NT’ - Article ID: 120642

Problem printing large batches of tickets:

Try changing your system so it does not create a new print job for every ticket. In this case, the printer works

better and faster. Try to limit the number of jobs opened and closed. You can also try sending a large batch of

tickets in a series of smaller batches. If possible, hook up an HP Jetdirect Print Server to the printer (requires a

parallel port) and see if the problem still exists. If so, it is probably a Network issue on the client’s end (likely a

bandwidth, configuration, slow link or router problem).

Client Network Problems:

Several clients had problems initially but they turned out to be networking issues on their end

(bandwidth problems, configuration settings, etc). Make sure everything is configured correctly on the Network.

Auto-Negotiate problem:

One client had an issue where his switches would not auto-negotiate correctly with the printer. Try manually

setting your switches to 100 Mbps, Full duplex.

Monitor traffic:

Are you able to monitor the Ethernet traffic between the Host and printer? Can you determine if the printer is not

responding to a particular packet or is going busy? Is it losing packets? Can you send us a copy of the packet

traffic at the point it fails?

Installing a packet sniffer program would greatly assist us in diagnosing this problem. It is recommended that

you use the same one we do so that the captured packet data can be analyzed here.