I ran into an issue with the Zebra printer in after hours when on call a few days ago and these are the steps that I took to eventually fix the problem. The Zebra printer was a 4Z M Plus. I have had all kinds of problems with these printers over the years, mostly because they are not very strongly built as network printers. First of all is the fact that the printer will only work at a speed of 10Half.
Here was the process in the middle of the night.
1. Isolated the problem. The problem was that printing worked but 5 minutes later it stopped working for no apparent reason. I logged onto the print servers and there was one print job from the printer hung on one print server. I deleted the print job and tried printing a test page to the printer from the same print server. The print job hung.
2. I looked at the print server logs. It seemed that there was problem for the last hour on all print jobs on the hg01 server. I stopped and restarted the print spooler service. I printed a test page and it went through. I then logged onto the web interface of the printer and saw that my print job went through.
3. Called back the users and told them all was fixed. It wasn’t and none of the jobs was printing. I tried again and it did not work. The web interface of the Zebra printer though did show the job has having printed. The printing was apparently working from the application as well as locally on the print server.
4. Additional Print server checks. Went back to the printer server to see if there were any problems and saw a datawindow error for that printers driver in the system log.
5. Replaced and fixed driver on the print server. Went to the printer properties for the non working Zebra printer and changed the driver to a different printer, hit apply, switched back to the right driver and hit apply again. Printed a test page from the print server
6. Heard cheering on the phone and after testing within the application the printer was actually working.
One other step that has worked in the past was to changed the IP of the printer through the web interface and then on both print servers. I also did this but in this case it had not fixed the problem.
