Our check-in system has been
working so quietly over the past 10 months that I forgot about it. I just
got off the phone with a friend who was experiencing some issues with their Zebra
printers and realized that I never wrote about how we fixed our issues.
The short story is: we threw out the Zebra drivers and replaced them with Seagull Scientific's drivers.
Here is long story with the background details...
Our Zebra LP2824 label printers are connected in two ways. Our children's
check-in system (which has centralized self-service kiosks) has a label printer
in each classroom that is connected to the network via a small Zebra print server
attached to the parallel port of the printer. Our Student check-in system
(which is uses classroom based self-service kiosks) connects a label printer directly
to the parallel port of the kiosk (a WinXP box).
Each label printer is defined on the check-in server (Windows 2003). Under
certain load conditions (usually Sunday at 9:30am) the windows spooler process would
terminate unexpectedly. Although we had
the system auto-restart the spooler, this problem would still cause one or more
undesirable effects (slowed kiosk response, delayed label printing, unprinted labels,
etc).
After much troubleshooting we finally called Microsoft at a bargain price of $200+
for the support call -- something that, in hindsight, we probably should have done
much sooner. For $200 we had a dedicated Microsoft engineer who worked continuously
for about a week running stress tests, examining performance logs and dump files, and a slew of other things.
He eventually concluded what we already knew. The Zebra driver was killing
the spooler. Their official recommendation was to replace the Zebra drivers
with ones from
Seagull Scientific.
Regardless how you feel about the resiliency Microsoft's spooler process, the
Seagull Scientific driver is better behaved and never crashes the spooler.
This translates to a check-in system that quietly works without issue leaving you
to move on to the next project.