This solution provides help troubleshooting situations where a printer appears to drop off the network or lose the network connection.
Procedure:
Verify that the printer is dropping off the network. To do this, ping the IP address of the printer from the host subnet when experiencing the connection issue. If it does not print but gets responses when pinging the IP address, the printer is still online and connected to the network. Something captures the TCP/IP port used for printing. The network management or a security application sending traffic to the IP address of the printer can cause this. You need to trace a network of all traffic to and from the IP address of the printer to determine if this is the case.
Also, if the printer is online but still not printing, try changing the Time-out Checking value. Refer to ZebraNet Print Server Time Out Checking for more information.
If the printer is not responding to the pings and returns to normal function when cycling power on the printer, then trace the network of all TCP/IP traffic to and from the IP address of the printer when the issue occurs.
Helpful Information:
Other questions to consider and provide to technical support for this type of issue:
- Does the problem only affect certain Zebra printers or print servers? If so, what are the differences? What are firmware versions, driver versions, locations, etc.?
- How often is the problem seen?
- Is it at specific times or intervals? (Some application or event might be impacting the connection).
- When did the problem start to occur? (Try to identify changes to the network or system configurations).
