Class-level problems with the network printing bundled into the e3000 haven’t subsided, HP reported to attendees at the recent Solutions Symposium. In fact, customers at the four-day event were encouraged to keep the HP Response Center from trying to close calls on Page Level Recovery failures, so the Expert Center and e3000 lab engineers can get a better look at the problems.

Page Level Recovery continues to fail between the e3000 and the newer HP LaserJet printers, while owners of the new LineJet or LPQ line printers are still wrestling with different recovery procedures on print jobs.Ginny Bratrud, the business manager handling printer issues at the Commercial Systems Division (CSY), told a packed house of attendees learning about network printing to keep calls open until HP could give them a real resolution to problems.

“We formed a team to look at the problems we’re hearing about,” Bratrud said. “We think we understand what the issues are. We’re trying to identify what the next steps are.” Expert Center engineer Bob Ledendecker is on the team as well, along with Goetz Neumann of the German Expert Center and lab members in California and Bangalore labs.

“Make sure the [problem] tickets you create are not closed,” Bratrud said. “Push back when the Response Center tries to do that.” She said the RC advice to “set PJL to FALSE” isn’t a fix for the problems, since it disables Page Level Recovery instead of making the feature work correctly.

“If an answer comes back that says PJL=FALSE, insist the call stays open,” said Ledendecker, which will drive the report into the Expert Center. Once the Expert Center gets the information, they’ll look into it directly with e3000 engineers in Bangalore. The network printing features of MPE/iX are engineered and maintained by the CSY labs in Bangalore.

Ledendecker said the Expert Center had not seen a lot of network printing problems, “so the lab really wasn’t aware of the problems. We finally started seeing it at HP World and hearing the feedback from [the Internet]. The answer may not differ from the [e3000] lab, but at least it’s the lab’s position, and not a workaround we feel is not truly a workaround.”

Problems with the LPQ/LineJet printers not supporting PLR may be resolved by power-cycling those printers after a jam. The recovery process is different from that of the 256X line printers, the predecessors for system printing on the e3000.