Network Printers are the legitimate Satan - Error: Printer not detected

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Holy down the power button and press the resume button 8 times to do a continuous test.

Wait, you needed that test in color, hold down the power button and press the resume button 13 times instead.

Oh, wait, you need to test the duplexer? Please hold down the power button and press the resume button 31 times.
 
Jesus H Christ dijo:
Yes, the business models cost more, because they are fucking designed to meet business needs without shitting the bed everyday.
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It's just a real shame they're still pieces of shit that shit the bed everyday anyway just like consumer printers, only heavier, more expensive and harder to service and repair. They're so absurdly unreliable (regardless of brand) that it's widely regarded as "a bad move" to buy one without a service contract. Every brand of "business printer" I've ever dealt with has been just as flaky as the high-end consumer models. Ikon, IBM, Tektronics, Xerox, you name it. They just have more internal places to jam, fail in more comical ways (my favorite is when those automatic stapler thingies jam and start creating abstract art with mangled staples) and cost more to fix.

Story time for illustrative purposes: In my late teens I worked for IBM as a hardware tester. One of the printers I tested for a few weeks was the size of two washing machines and weighed more than me that -- despite its size and nearly $10k price tag -- could somehow only print letter and legal sized documents at a blazing 12 pages per minute, jammed a lot, did little else, and took forty fucking minutes to become ready after being powered on. I'm not exaggerating. It really did take forty minutes.

We dreaded having to power cycle that piece of shit (which loved to crash on a regular basis) and it became routine for the team to test it in the morning until it crashed, then test something else until lunch time, power cycle the bastard and go to lunch, then resume testing it when we got back until it crashed again. Then we fucked off to test other printers for the rest of the day while the idiot who designed the damned thing "debugged" it.

I discovered why it was so unbearably slow one afternoon when I asked him about the slow startup time. He explained it to me straight-faced as if it was perfectly reasonable to use the approach he did and to make users wait more than half an hour to use their expensive printer. It ran AIX, IBM's Unix variant. And not a stripped-down flavor of AIX. Full-blown AIX. Including a desktop environment you could never reach because the fucking thing had no video, keyboard or mouse ports and didn't allow remote logins anyway. You talked to it through the serial port or the front panel of ordinary printer controls. And the hardware running AIX inside the printer was woefully underpowered -- it had worse specs than IBM's shittiest AIX-capable user workstation at the time. It wasn't clear how they'd even obtained such shitty gear to shove into a printer chassis. It ran off a hard disk (not SSD) and hit swap long before it'd even finished booting because of how little RAM they put in the stupid thing.

He did not take it well when my arrogant 19-year-old self told him how absolutely retarded the whole thing was, and I was "released" from my contract there a few weeks later which was a relief because they were about to start a brand new six-month cycle of testing for the innovative addition of -- wait for it -- the euro symbol to the character sets. And that stupid fucking 40-minute-boot-time printer made it to production. Fun fact: a token ring network interface was the standard (default) configuration on it, too. Fucking IBM.
 
moocow dijo:
It's just a real shame they're still pieces of shit that shit the bed everyday anyway just like consumer printers, only heavier, more expensive and harder to service and repair. They're so absurdly unreliable (regardless of brand) that it's widely regarded as "a bad move" to buy one without a service contract. Every brand of "business printer" I've ever dealt with has been just as flaky as the high-end consumer models. Ikon, IBM, Tektronics, Xerox, you name it. They just have more internal places to jam, fail in more comical ways (my favorite is when those automatic stapler thingies jam and start creating abstract art with mangled staples) and cost more to fix.

Story time for illustrative purposes: In my late teens I worked for IBM as a hardware tester. One of the printers I tested for a few weeks was the size of two washing machines and weighed more than me that -- despite its size and nearly $10k price tag -- could somehow only print letter and legal sized documents at a blazing 12 pages per minute, jammed a lot, did little else, and took forty fucking minutes to become ready after being powered on. I'm not exaggerating. It really did take forty minutes.

We dreaded having to power cycle that piece of shit (which loved to crash on a regular basis) and it became routine for the team to test it in the morning until it crashed, then test something else until lunch time, power cycle the bastard and go to lunch, then resume testing it when we got back until it crashed again. Then we fucked off to test other printers for the rest of the day while the idiot who designed the damned thing "debugged" it.

I discovered why it was so unbearably slow one afternoon when I asked him about the slow startup time. He explained it to me straight-faced as if it was perfectly reasonable to use the approach he did and to make users wait more than half an hour to use their expensive printer. It ran AIX, IBM's Unix variant. And not a stripped-down flavor of AIX. Full-blown AIX. Including a desktop environment you could never reach because the fucking thing had no video, keyboard or mouse ports and didn't allow remote logins anyway. You talked to it through the serial port or the front panel of ordinary printer controls. And the hardware running AIX inside the printer was woefully underpowered -- it had worse specs than IBM's shittiest AIX-capable user workstation at the time. It wasn't clear how they'd even obtained such shitty gear to shove into a printer chassis. It ran off a hard disk (not SSD) and hit swap long before it'd even finished booting because of how little RAM they put in the stupid thing.

He did not take it well when my arrogant 19-year-old self told him how absolutely retarded the whole thing was, and I was "released" from my contract there a few weeks later which was a relief because they were about to start a brand new six-month cycle of testing for the innovative addition of -- wait for it -- the euro symbol to the character sets. And that stupid fucking 40-minute-boot-time printer made it to production. Fun fact: a token ring network interface was the standard (default) configuration on it, too. Fucking IBM.
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Holy jesus fucking christ that is one of the most retarded things I have ever seen

Also: token ring; what in the fuck are these dudes thinking
Woe-B-Gon (TM) dijo:
Holy down the power button and press the resume button 8 times to do a continuous test.

Wait, you needed that test in color, hold down the power button and press the resume button 13 times instead.

Oh, wait, you need to test the duplexer? Please hold down the power button and press the resume button 31 times.
Presiona para expandir...
To factory reset mine it is to hold the "stop" button for 20 seconds until the warning light flashes then wait for it to flash "exactly" 21 times

Edit: fuck phoneposting
 
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moocow dijo:
They're so absurdly unreliable (regardless of brand) that it's widely regarded as "a bad move" to buy one without a service contract.
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Yeah, you never actually get to the mythical "industrial grade printer", you just trade up on the grifting ladder from ink subscriptions and disposable hardware to service contracts.
 
moocow dijo:
Fun fact: a token ring network interface was the standard (default) configuration on it, too. Fucking IBM.
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I have only never noticed non 10BASE-T networks in operation in real life outside the Windows 3.11 manual in the form of LocalTalk, but even on vintage computing YouTube, I can't find videos of people actually playing with Token Ring. 10Base-5 with original vampire taps yes, but nobody's Token Ring level crazy.
 
Moths dijo:
Also: token ring; what in the fuck are these dudes thinking
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They dogfood like crazy at their campuses, so imagine a workplace comprised entirely of IBM technology, designs and equipment. Even the card readers for all the doors and turnstiles (and the locks themselves) were IBM. The official email client for desktops was Lotus Notes. OS/2 workstations were common. If you weren't part of the IBM tech cult, it was a nightmarish hellscape of utterly bizarre setups and design decisions. I met Cthulhu long before he appeared in Quake, and he was not impressed by what he saw there.

And they were salty as fuck about token ring losing out to ethernet in the market, too. The entire campus was 100% token ring, probably in part because nobody else wanted that garbage and so there was tons of equipment lying around. And it was every bit as shitty as you might imagine. My favorite "feature" of token ring networking was how a single malfunctioning network node could disrupt the entire local ring (i.e. a "subnet") through a fun failure mode called "beaconing" where the NIC just "screams" at the ring nonstop, blocking all other traffic.
 
DDBCAE CBAADCBE dijo:
Lol, I’ve never used a printer in my life. At least not in any direct sense. Anytime I’ve ever needed anything printed I’ve always had someone else do it for me.
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Living the dream, lad. Well done. A life without printers is something most of us can only ever aspire to but never achieve.
 
My current job is the worst with printer issues. Everyone uses Citrix Receiver/Workspace for almost everything, and for some reason profiles will just suddenly stop communicating with the network printers in the office, doesn't even matter if you use the "universal" driver that's supposed to instantly work, reset the spooler, uninstall/reinstall the printer. USB direct connect seems to get over this issue, but not everyone has that kind of luxury given that half the office shares printers that are located on different ends of the office.
 
SSF2T Old User dijo:
My current job is the worst with printer issues. Everyone uses Citrix Receiver/Workspace for almost everything, and for some reason profiles will just suddenly stop communicating with the network printers in the office, doesn't even matter if you use the "universal" driver that's supposed to instantly work, reset the spooler, uninstall/reinstall the printer. USB direct connect seems to get over this issue, but not everyone has that kind of luxury given that half the office shares printers that are located on different ends of the office.
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Yeah I can imagine it can be pretty horrifying to have another layer of software between the computer and printer to fuck up what can already be a somewhat arcane process
 
It means the printers machine spirit is displeased if its not working correctly. Perform the rite of appeasement followed by the rite of maintenance, all while burning blessed incense and make sure you offer a suitable sacrifice during the rites of appeasement
 
SSF2T Old User dijo:
My current job is the worst with printer issues. Everyone uses Citrix Receiver/Workspace for almost everything, and for some reason profiles will just suddenly stop communicating with the network printers in the office, doesn't even matter if you use the "universal" driver that's supposed to instantly work, reset the spooler, uninstall/reinstall the printer. USB direct connect seems to get over this issue, but not everyone has that kind of luxury given that half the office shares printers that are located on different ends of the office.
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This is best solved (seriously) by setting up a CUPS server somewhere on the wired network (it's lightweight and can sit on just about any Unix/Linux server; it ran perfectly well on Solaris 8.x way back in 2000, so I'm certain it's just as portable now -- it's also still actively maintained) and pairing it with a Samba server to provide printer service to Windows machines. Samba's a fickle beast as well in many circumstances, so it's perfectly acceptable to strip down its configuration so that it just serves printing requests and (optionally) also serves up printer drivers to Windows workstations on demand.

CUPS is essentially a print spooler that supports pretty much any printer you can reach from the machine it's installed on, whether a local serial, parallel or USB connection or a network printer listening on LPR, IPP and/or AppSocket ports. It comes with a ton of drivers and many vendors provide PPD files for their printers that can be trivially added to a CUPS instance.

So you set up all your office printers on the CUPS instance, set up a Samba instance to serve them up (if memory serves, there's some automation available between CUPS and Samba to allow Samba to automatically discover and auto-configure each printer so you don't have to set up Samba printer queues by hand). Then you just point your client machines at the CUPS server. It supports autodiscovery features like DNS-SD, so often you don't even need any special setup on the clients. They'll just magically spot the CUPS server and make all its printers available to the user.

Much to my surprise (and chagrin) when I first worked with it, it turns out to be Apple software. I still find it astonishing they've ever produced an actually useful and reliable product, but here we are.

Moths dijo:
Yeah I can imagine it can be pretty horrifying to have another layer of software between the computer and printer to fuck up what can already be a somewhat arcane process
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Indeed. I usually don't like adding layers to the print process, but CUPS turns out to "flatten" the stack a little bit. In fact, depending on the printers in use, it can sometimes eliminate the need for those big "driver suites" a lot of printers come with in lieu of using a simpler "basic" driver that lets the CUPS server deal with the nuances of each printer.
 
Kosher Dill dijo:
Yeah, you never actually get to the mythical "industrial grade printer", you just trade up on the grifting ladder from ink subscriptions and disposable hardware to service contracts.
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I once worked at a place that had a built in place $10 million dollar Xerox printer for true industrial use. Unlike me, it didn't work.
 
My dad once bought an HP printer, turned it on, and connected it to the network. The printer then proceeded to crash the network by ceaselessly spamming inquiries to locate other HP printers.

This was at a major tech research university, and their network was brought down by a single rogue printer on its default settings.
 
Back in the 90's my mom worked for the first company in the state to have one of the new wide color printers for making banners and signs. It was like 24" (nowadays you can get them upwards of 96"), and only took standard ink cartridges (now they typically have some kind of resevoir system). Those tiny ink cartridges made printing a gamble.

If it ran out in the middle? Had to start over from scratch. If you refilled it between printing out panels? Had to do enough color tests to match the two panels that you were gambling on there being enough to finish the panel.

And then there were times it just decided to stop working for random reasons. One time she was on the phone with tech support and they told her to cut through a seal that said "warranty not valid if damaged" to access some circuit board. She refused. Another time the tech support flat out said "that doesn't happen".

They were also intimidated by her boss, the owner (small business). Every so often she'd go and ask him to come in and glare at the printer. He come into the room, frown at the printer, and it would start working.
 
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