Archive for May, 2009

Work-around for retreiving SNMP info from Phaser 6250 using Windows 2003 IPP printing

Wednesday, May 27th, 2009

There’s seems to be a problem with the way the Err object in asp handles some of the data it receives from Xerox Phaser 6250 printers.  This prevents it from being able to display snmp information using the “Device Status” page in windows IPP .  I found a work around by editing the ipp_0000.inc file in c:\windows\web\printers .  Here’s the original code:

   hrPrintDetectedState = objSNMP.GetAsByte (“25.3.5.1.2.” & StrDevice)
    If Err Then Exit Function

This works fine for an hp2430 printer, but gives an invalid argument error when run against a xerox phaser 6250 without any error conditions.  Using an MIB browser, I checked 1.3.6.1.2.1.25.3.5.1.2.1 to see what each return for the hrPrinterDetectedErrorState.1 when there wasn’t an error.  The hp printer returns nothing, but the Xerox Phaser returned an octet string of 00-0x00-0x00-0x00 which possibly caused some time of error for the GetAsByte function.

As a work around, I did this:

hrPrintDetectedState = objSNMP.GetAsByte (“25.3.5.1.2.” & StrDevice)
    If Err Then Err.Clear

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May 25th to 29th

Monday, May 25th, 2009

The IPP printing system so far seems to work well with windows, linux and mac clients, with the caveat that print management from cups clients isn’t supported. To work around this, I’ve had to change the default ErrorPolicy to abort-job for those clients, and use the web interface to manage the print jobs.

  • Continued black network switchover tests
  • Update automated scripts for non-nfs linked dgp servers

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Resolved Hydra update problem

Friday, May 22nd, 2009

The rpm package “file” conflicted with the dependencies for httpd on all the nodes except neuron-0-24, which had been recently re-installed. I ran yum clean metadata and was able to get the other nodes to update correctly.

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Custom print settings for Mac OS X clients

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

While I was experimenting with IPP printing last week, I found a link to a great site that explained how to fully customize the printer setup on mac os x clients.  Here is a link to the article. The important thing is knowing that you have to add the “Advanced” Icon to the toolbar in the print options in order to add a printer with an arbitrary string (i.e. that starts with http, or includes username:password in the printer location). Instead of setting up a samba printer, I used it to add the http printer (which is what windows sets up instead of an ipp printer). It looks like it would also be possible to do smb authentication this way, with a string like the following:

smb://username:password@corman/Mom

I haven’t tried this out, but I will be trying this along with other options to see what the best print solution would be. Once I’ve finished I’ll add some instructions to the wiki.

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May 19th to 22nd

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

I’ve made some progress with the IPP printing systems, including figuring out that windows and mac os x clients have different ideas of where to connect to find such services.  So far, it works but doesn’t accurate resolve the printer status after a print job has been sent.

  • Java update on windows machines
  • Continued IPP testing and work
  • Testing new black network scripts

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May 11th to 15th

Tuesday, May 12th, 2009

Windows software updates are released this week.  I’ll also be working on setting up a few different silent  installers that rely on the innodb installer, since the command line options for it are well defined.

  • Windows security updates
  • innodb silent installers for xming, audacity
  • testing IPP printing through windows

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