mcc@wlv.imsd.contel.com (Merton Campbell Crockett) (04/18/91)
I'm back with another series of questions on NetWare 386. I have read most of the manuals delivered with the product which I have found to be somewhat con- fusing and disorganised; however, I suspect they are organised and quite ade- quate for the bulk of their customer base. Also, it doesn't help to have the network in production use and be, simulta- neously, involved in three proposals. Let's get on with it! The current series of questions have arisen from an individual being unable to print a fairly large AutoCAD drawing at 300 dpi on an HP LaserJet Series II or HP LaserJet III. When printed by the HP LaserJet, the drawing should fit (and has in the past) fit on a single page; however, now he only gets a single corner of the drawing with no reduction on one print server and causes a system crash on a second server. We have switched the HP LaserJets between the servers--the problems do not follow the printers. We have received a NetWare 386 3.11 update but are currently running NetWare 386 3.10 A which was delivered with our system engineering workstation and server upgrades. The PSERVER.NLM which is loaded automatically advertises that it is version 1.2. The file and print server that crashes only crashes when this drawing is at- tempted to be printed. The drawing is actually reduced to fit on an 8.5 by 11 page on this system; but only a portion of the drawing is printed before the crash. One has to press Form Feed to find out what has been printed. On the other file and print server, as stated above, there is no reduction and only a corner of the drawing is printed. I managed to get the notification on completion turned on but can't remember which menu controls that function--I would like to turn it off again. It has proved somewhat useful. The notification appears to be sent by PSERVER when the file is sent to the printer and not necessarily when the file is actually printed although it may simply mean that the printer has accepted the last byte of data. Anyway because the notification on completion is turned on, it appears that the capture process is interpreting the AutoCAD output to be a request to print two files. The first file is suspected to be the LaserJet initialization commands and the second file the drawing data. There are two completion notifications received. Using the disk activity light on the server as a diagnostic tool, it appears that the data for the drawing is not sent until a Ctrl-Enter is entered from the workstation. The window/menu that shows the printer status--PCONSOLE(?), PRINTCON(?)--has the re-initialize action set at end of printing. Assuming that CAPTURE is treating the AutoCAD output as two separate actions, this would explain the failure of the drawing to be reduced on one of the servers. Is there a timer set or used by CAPTURE to determine that the file is complete? Another potential NetWare problem identified while looking at this printer problem relates to memory management. If one unloads PSERVER, there is a se- ries of messages displayed on the console complaining about the failure to release resources. We powered off the server and rebooted it without doing a proper shutdown and noted a much higher transfer rate across the network when we tried to print the drawing--it still seemed to be treated as two separate files but it was a significant performance improvement. Doing this without doing the proper shutdown sequence resulted in the other file and printer server shutting down as well. It seemed to have been a fairly orderly shutdown--no complaints when the server was brought back up and the print operation in progress was restarted automatically. Is this normal behav- iour? Does a sudden, unplanned outage of a single file and print server cause all other servers to fail? The server in question is intended to be moved to another location in the building--we might want to define some procedures con- cerning shutting the system down. This second server which is the one that crashes during the printing of the drawing doesn't seem to effect the first server when it crashes. Returning to the memory management problem. How does one avoid what appears to be the effects of memory fragmentation on the network? Does NetWare 386 3.11 offer a correction/solution to this problem? As it appears that I am fast becoming the designated NetWare puke, it seems that it would be desirable to perform the upgrade. As my time is also limited and users have a certain degree of reluctance to have someone change software on their systems, is it possible to do a rolling upgrade? Can a workstation running the 3.10 release of NetWare interoperate with a server running 3.11? Also, can a server running 3.10 co-exist with a server running 3.11? Merton Campbell Crockett