Print notification - Long delay

[eladgrs]

Hello,

I am the system administrator of 3000 PCs and

the DCs are windows 2003 standared edition.

the Pcs are all W2k SP4.

The print server is W2k3 SP1.

I configured the print server to : "Notify when remote documents are
printed"

This worked just fine on wk2 advance server (SP4).

After I set up all printers and configured the server all worked just
fine.

after a couple of hours I noticed the the print notification pops a 30
minutes after the print was occured....

I also noticed that the problem got worser (hour..6 hours...Never..).

When I send "Net send" command (to user) everything works just fine.
The Wins works great (I can see the resolving)...

I put a sniffer and saw that for some reason the netbios session does
not open after the printer sent the last ack.

I tried reinstalling a fresh copy of OS - the same problem.

I replaced the machine...

I deleted all DNS/WINS print server recoreds...

Does someone know from where this problem comes from ???

My guess his that there is a buffer and somthing get stack there...

BTW: Retsrating the messnger service - nothing change....
Print service - Nothing change....


Thanks

Elad

System Admin

 

[Terrence]

Does the delay go away after "net stop spooler" and "net start spooler" on
the print server machine?

 

[eladgrs]

Restarting the spooler not solving this problem.....
Only after rebooting the server the problem solves - for one hour....
(See the BTW remark..)


Thanks

 

[Terrence]

Sorry, nothing specific to add then.

To try and narrow down the source of the problem, you could try this: create
another printer of the same type, but assign to it the NUL: port (this
throws away the data). Print lots of documents on it. Do notifications
still slow down?

If so, then do the same thing, but pick the Generic Text printer type, and
also assign to it the NUL: port. After printing lots of documents to it, do
the notifications still slow down?

If so, then the problem is not printer-driver specific (which almost all
printing problems are).

If not, then the problem is probably with the printer-driver, as usual.

Try disabling the "bi-directional" feature -- the number and types of
problems solved by disabling this is large and varied. If printing to the
NUL device does not have a slowdown, then this feature could be involved in
the problem.

Look in the WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\SPOOL\PRINTERS folder -- are there lots of
documents? Is the "keep printed documents" feature set? Maybe the
notification does not work well when there are lots of documents in the
spooler folder?

Grasping at straws, probably not very helpful...

 

[Guest]

Did you ever find anything on this issue, i am having the exact same problem,
went to 2k3 sp1 and 2000 clients no longer get print notifications.

 

[Guest]

Ok, i found what was causing this issue for me, an oversight and makes sense
since 2003 w/ SP1 locks down more services. I fixed this by starting the
"Alerter" service and setting it back to automatic for start, now the print
notifications are poping again.