Just thought i’d quickly share this.

One of our clients has a couple of photocopiers they installed before we came on board.

We made sure that we had the information to connect to them when setting up new PC’s so we new what driver to use, which options to select, tray types, etc

Last week we put some new PCs so we setup the connections to the photocopiers

I got a call today to say that they couldn’t print to one of them

I logged in to have a look and when i sent a test page the job just sat in the queue doing nothing.

After i’d tried just about every avenue i started over and decided to think about the process.

I clicked the print option and the job is submitted to the spooler ok (i can see this in printer list and also in C:\Windows\system32\spool\printers where you can see the files appear)

So what should happen next is the print monitor on the PC should pick this up and communicate with the printer over the desired port (parallel, USB, TCP/IP). Since this was a network photocopier it was TCP/IP so went into the printer monitor settings (in the print driver, select the ports tab, click the port and then click CONFIGURE PORT)

I spotted something that normally i would have glossed straight over but as i was getting a little frustrated i was checking every single setting

RAW Settings, Port Number: 9100

This is the port on which the TCP/IP communication occurs between the PC and the printer. 9100 is the standard setting but i noticed on the existing PC it was 10001

I set this to the new value and it all started working

I don’t think I’ve every come across a printer that uses a non-standard port so that’s something I’ve learnt today

The second thing I’ve learnt is that it’s obvious test pages weren’t run off at the time of installation! Looks like there is a process hole to fix