HP 600 series NIC

[Big Al]

We recently ran into an issue with the HP 600 NIC's not working on the network. They get through the BOOT-P process and the DHCP server issues a valid IP address but the process stalls there. The Network guy can see the IP address but cannot PING it and the IP address never gets down to the card. The 610 NIC's and the newer 615 and 620 do not have this problem. The Network IT people insist they have not made any changes. We will probably never find out what is doing it. We are running the 2010 version of server software. Just a heads-up in case your older printers with the 600 NIC's quit working. There are two versions of the 600, one has the BNC and the Apple port as well as an RJ-45 port and is a light gray, the other just has an RJ-45 port. Neither one works anymore on our network.

Al

[ridered74]

I ran into this at a law firm. Every time a 4000 went in place of a 4200 (they moved secretaries around constantly), the 4000's wouldn't work and could never be pinged. They used static IP's, so I'm not sure if they would have pulled IP's or not, so it might be a little different than your situation, but they would swear it wasn't on their end. The first time we replaced everything that could possibly cause that on the printer and it never fixed it. It ended up being the settings on their ports, most of them were set to auto and if I remember right the 4000's needed to have the ports set to 100 half duplex in order for them to work.

My company ended up just buying me a laptop so that I could use a cross cable to connect directly to the printer to prove to them that it was their issue not ours. Saved me hundreds of hours over the next few years because they would have this issue at least once every week or two. If you have no choice but to fix it, I would start by trying every option for the port that you can change.

[Big Al]

We found a work-around. Most of the printers involved were 2200's which have no maintenance panel. We had to put the 600 NIC in a machine with a maintenance panel
and put a valid IP in there, then move it back to the 2200. Some time ago we got rid of our 4000's since they had no USB port and the laptops in use had no LPT1 ports.
Some of these 600 NIC's we saved from the 4000's wound up in the 2200 models and worked fine until recently.

Al

[ridered74]

Sounds like the cards were already set statically? If so you could just do a cold reset on the 2200 with the nic installed and achieve the same effect.

[Big Al]

That should be what would happen and what did happen in the past. Something changed in the network, I'm not sure when. Now after a cold reset the request for an IP address goes out, clears the BootP process, the DHCP server assigns a valid IP address but the process stops there. The network guys can see the address that has been assigned to that MAC address but they cannot PING it because the address never got back down the line to the NIC in the printer. If you take that 600 NIC out and put it in a printer with a maintenance panel and force that IP address, or another unused IP address in your scope, then put the card back in the 2200 all is well with the world. Put a 610, 615 or 620 NIC in the 2200 and cold reset it then you get a valid, working IP address instantly. Of course the network guys insist they have not changed anything but we have two tiers of management over the servers and are running server software 2010. We have a large group of 2200's that we send out but most all of them have 610 NIC's.

Al

[ridered74]

That is really really weird. I'm sure it would make perfect sense if we knew exactly why it was doing it tho. LOL!