Dell1815dn prints garbage

Applications: Word 2003 and Word 2007.

We have also managed to get this garbage print from the "print a test page" in the driver settings screen as well...

Can you provide some details of your network topology and how ALL your printers are connected?

Please include all computers, routers, switches, hubs, etc.

AND..... What application(s) you are using to print from.

We have a star topology. At the top is a PowerEdge 2716. Most clients are connected to this switch either directly or with another PowerEdge 2716 in between (because the office physically had 1 network cable in the walls so the switch functions as a kind of splitter in between).

Other than that we have 2 Windows 2003 R2 server machines, 4 Vista business clients, 2 XP Pro clients and 2 XP Home clients. Both the 1815dn and 3100cn printers are connected through a second PE2716 switch (although not the same one). We have 1 master PE2716 and 2 secondary PE2716's to do the cable splitting...

This is indeed a very strange problem. I've never heard of anything like this before.

And replacment of an 1815dn produced the same symptom, right?

You indicated in an earlier post that you saw some PJL as part of the "garbage". Can you reply with what some of these strings were?

For something disruptive enough for the printer to reject the PJL codes is odd, especially if you don't see other issues on your network. Have you done any network trace analyses?

I'm gonna copy my partner in crime to this...... his network analyses skills are far superior to mine. He's out on other business today so he likely won't see this until friday.

Are the drivers installed on the server(s), or on a client by client basis?

Wondering if you've tried installing the 1815dn drivers on a single client and tried the same things?

From the info you've already provided, is this problem is intermittant?

Are there specific print jobs you can submit which will cause the problem every time?

And you never encounter this problem with the 3100cn, right?

At first I tried to share the printer on the server side and install the drivers there. I could only properly do this for the XP pc's because the Vista drivers cannot be installed to W2003R2. Since we experienced this problem we tried to install everything on a client by client (from the Dell CD). So each client connects to the Dell 1815dn directly.

Unfortunately we are unable to reproduce in a consistent manner. If there would be a single point of failure all the time it would be far easier to debug/determine what is going wrong.

Today I booted the printer and printed from my computer (so nobody else or so was trying to print or had any jobs in queue etc) but got garbage immediately.. It just does not make any sense to me.

With the 3100cn we never experienced any single problem (not ever!) and it has been here for 2 years or so now... We should have got the 3115cn instead but it is far more expensive and we didnt need color printing...

I have seen & fixed many network problems before, but this one is beyond my knowledge...

The PJL strings are part of the job description. It is like the resolution, document which is being printed, user who is printing it etc. I will get some of these garbage papers and send you a more detailed description. The only thing I noticed that the first characters will almost always be DCMS or something... I am at home now so can't list the strings right away...

I have not done any network trace analyses (because honestly I have no "clue" what I am looking for). If the problem would at least be reproducable in a consistent manner that would help a lot. If you have any suggestions about what to do let me know ;-)

My best guess would still be a driver problem, but it is very strange that we seem to be the only ones experiencing the issue...

Hey man thanks for looking into this!

I just found a couple of these sheets and they always start with:

"DMCS)" later on the line it also lists the application the job was printed from.

the next lines are very readable and are:

@PJL SET RESOLUTION=600

@PJL SET IMAGEQUALITY=0

@PJL DEFAULT SERVICEDATE=20080125

@PJL SET DUPLEX=OFF (some of the sheets are ON here followed with a @PJL BINDING LONGEDGE)

@PJL SET PAPERTYPE=OFF

@PJL SET BANNERSHEET=OFF

@PJL SET TIMESTAMP=OFF

@PJL SET USERNAME="Phil"

@PJL SET JOBNAME="Untitled - Notepad"

@PJL SET ALTITUDE=LOW

DMCS) and then the garbage starts again...

I also found garbage sheets which were printed from Word or "Test Page"...

Something seems scrambled in the header which causes the printer not to recognize the print job properly and it starts dumping the incoming stream as ASCII to the printer :-(

Yes, I would agree with that !!!

If the Universal PJL Entry code is not recognized by the printer, the remaining "stuff" would merely be printed as text. Curious that "DCMS)" shoud appear in lead and trailing. I would suspect it has something to do with the Universal PJL Entry/Exit code, but have NEVER seen it expressed as such.

You have any idea what DMCS) is?

Yep...... I'm very familiar with PJL commands. And we've also discovered they are not completely 100% transportable from platform to platform. I-O-W, the PJL that works fine on your HPLJ4 may not work correctly on your 3100cn or 1815dn, and so on. It's usually going from HP or Lexmark to other vendors where the biggest problems arise. Some vendors practice "variation on a theme".

Something you could try, if  you haven't already. Send a NOTEPAD doc to the printer. This will utilize the most basic PCL/PJL command stream possible..... see if you can get the problem to repeat.

DMCS = digital multinational character set ?

To answer your questions:

- It is our belief that if it happens once it keeps happening. Since it is a waste of paper we always power cycled the printer.

- We have installed the PCL 6 driver. Today I've replaced it with the other driver (does not mention any postscript/pcl) to see what it behaves like. The problem is that nobody is sending any print jobs to that machine anymore since it is such an annoyance... So I end up with very little debug info...

- It also happens with jobs from machines which are not running photoshop

- The printer has the default of 96Mb of memory available. A single notepad file with the word "test" should not overflow this buffer ;-)

- Occurance... The printer is being neglected at the moment so it's hard to say ;-)

A couple of days ago I turned on the printer and wanted to execute a one page print with little or no bitmaps... I got garbage immediately so there was no "previous" print job which could have overflowed anything...

Yes I can capture network traffic if you want... Somehow I have the feeling I should be able to capture on the "receiving" end (i.e. printer)...

Thanks

Could you clarify a few things for me, just to make sure I understand.

- If this random garbage print occurs, will the printer return to normal printing for subsequent jobs, or do you always power cycle the printer to stop the print job. In fact, I'd just like to know if on ANY occassion the printer was not reset (someone failed to notice the garbage print) and subsequent print jobs succeeded or failed.

- Are you printing with the PJL driver or Postscript driver? I believe this printer supports both.  It's very likely the postscript driver actually uses a PJL header.  There is a command in PJL that says "switch to this language" (i.e. postscript) so the PJL header you seen doesn't negate this possibility.

- Do all the machines with printing errors have photoshope installed?  (You mentioned photoshop would not start up after installing the 1815 driver and having to uninstall / re-install).

- Have you added any memory to the 1815? In the printer EWS (Web server) click "printer information" on the left column.  In the center area there will be a line that says  "Installed Memory"  Can you tell me that value for your printers?

- Do you see a higher occurance at the end of the day?

Before we look into network issues, I want to make sure there is not a buffer over-run.  If the processor ran out of memory it could have unpredictable results.  Printers perform a certain amount of memory management - a single print job can send bitmaps, fonts, etc that must be stored then cleared.  So previous printing could affect the result. Thus a print job could fail due to a memory issue, but after you power-cycle the printer work correctly.  Once an over-run occurs the printer state could be in question.