E-Gad !!@@#%&*

[ooojaya]

My company has multiple HP laser jets and some Okididata impact printers which have HP jet direct boxes on them. Lately, about 5 various printers of both type have been printing out an "HP JetDirect Diagnostic Page" at random times during the day. The page says an event occurred that has caused the JetDirect to reset. It then says the exception is '00fb', although this changes every time, and it prints a whole list of stack and register memory dump numbers and letters. What is this monster??????

[Big Al]

Those external Jetdirect adapters will reset if there is a power blip. Are all five of these on the same circuit? Maybe something is overloading this circuit intermittently just enough to set off the Jetdirect boxes? If you could round up a small UPS box and put the wall adapter for the Jetdirect unit on the UPS that might tell you something. If the UPS beeps occasionaly that will tell you something is pulsing that power. I have seen this in buildings where the 110 V AC circuits were overloaded and every time the fuser on the big printer would kick on all the UPS units in the room would beep. My two cents!

Al

[ooojaya]

Sounds like good advice but all the printers are quite a ways apart from each other so I dont think they are on the same circuit. In fact a couple of them I know have several printers on the same electric circuit but only one of them gets affected.

[Big Al]

If the server loses contact with the Jetdirect box that might initiate a reset of the Jetdirect box? Maybe try swapping Ethernet cables between the printer with the problem and one that is working? Are you using a hub or a switch? DHCP or fixed IP addresses?

Al

[ooojaya]

Big Al,

We are using a switch and all our equipments has fixed ip addresses. Took your advise about switching cables and we just had another test page on that one printer. It was a HP 4200. So the firmware should be pretty up to date. Before this one, our older jet direct boxes and 2300 and 4000 printers were only affected.

[Big Al]

Try using JetAdmin to check the printer firmware on all the printers of a particular type, such as HP 4000 or whaterver. Are they all the same? Which are giving the bogus test pages and which are not? A note of caution: if the power fails during a printer firmware upgrade you need to download the firmware file from HP and load it into the printer through a Centronix cable. Sometimes these upgrades fail the first time and you have to run the upgrade again. Some printers want to do a cold reset after the upgrade. Write down the IP address before you start!

Al

[ooojaya]

Some of the external jet boxes couldn't be upgraded-no upgrade available. We purchased newer ones and the problem stopped. For those LJ 4000, we upgraded the firmware and the weird pages stopped printing also. No clue what the actual problem is, but for those that are curious, this solved the problem.

[cs_steve]

Thanks for letting us know ...