I have a client with two Epson wide format printers. One of them is older, an SC P5000, and it works perfectly. Nothing weird there.
They got a new printer, an SC P9000 a while back. Ever since, it goes "offline" every 3.5 hours. It requires a power cycle and it'll come back online and work normally. We've had an Epson tech check the sleep settings and replace the internal board, he says there's nothing wrong with the printer.
I configured the printer to use DHCP, and it's connecting to a print server (Windows). It has a DHCP reservation. It's shared out from the print server to the rest of the computers with group policy.
One important thing: we tried connecting a laptop to it directly and setting static IPs on the laptop and printer. It was NOT going offline and was connected that way for days.
One more important note about the behavior of the printer: when it goes "offline" (according to print server) it is still pingable, and the web UI page will partially connect(i get certificate warning and the page title + blank background as it tries to load), but never fully load the page. It will never time out either, at least not in a regular amount of time.
Here's what I've done:
- Compared settings between the P5000 and P9000. Everything that can be the same is.
- I found that the printer was trying to send out mDNS packets and those were being dropped by the firewall. I enabled multicast forwarding and now those packets are being consumed.
- I scrapped the original set up on the print server and did it from scratch to make sure I didn't mess something up during initial set up (this is the same set up I do for other clients, whose printers are working fine)
- Tried using static IP instead of DHCP.
- Epson tech told me it might be because some port it needs to function is blocked. I scanned the ports open on the printer and tried running a test overnight where I pinged them every minute to see if that would keep it online, but it still went offline. I did this from the print server. IIRC one port in particular stopped responding when it went offline.
- Tested different ethernet cables and jacks.
- Checked for firewall rules that could be blocking things (before i did the ping test)
- Changed speed/duplex settings from 'Auto' to 100BaseTx + Full Duplex (no 1000 available)
- Checked the port configuration settings (on print server) and they seem correct, I compared against the working P5000 printer.
Any insight would be appreciated, this has been driving me mad for a while.
