LaserJet Pro M501dn won't wake up from sleep mode

[LPE397]

Sometimes when going in to sleep mode the printer qon't wake up without being turned off, and then back on. I am not in a position to set a static IP or turn off IPv6 since we use both DHCP and IPv6 for everything.

Latest driver is over 18 months old, and no new drivers on the website. Please help.

[John_Getzke]

Printer sleep features are not impacted by drivers.  You need firmware updates to influence that behavior.  If HP were going to patch something like that they would have done so by now.  Double check and make sure you are using the latest firmware.

DHCP and IPv6 are not normally mandatory network settings.  Its all the same to the connecting clients.  Talk to your network administrators and see if they can make an exception for your printers.  Ask for them to help you setup an experiment.  See if this behavior goes away if you configure static or disable ipv6. If not then you can turn it back to the way it was and try something different.

[LPE397]

I misspoke. By Driver, I mean firmware. There is no updated firmware since Dec 2017.

As for DHCP and IPv6. I am the network admin, and DHCP and IPv6 are mandatory here. We are dual stack, and IPv4 is secondary. If you know ANYTHING about IPv6 you know that you make extensive use of DHCPv6 and DNS.

We use the latest UPDv6 and print exclusively from a Windows 2012R2 print server. We do NOT allow direct printing, and all drivers are managed centrally. We are an enterprise shop. When a printer drops offline it is usually because it has been asleep for longer than a day. That said, when we set the auto wake to wake the printer we sometimes have issues with the printer not waking up properly.

None of the other printers have this issue. That is why we believe it to be local to the Pro m501dn model.

[John_Getzke]

> As for DHCP and IPv6. I am the network admin, and DHCP and IPv6 are mandatory here. We are dual stack, and IPv4 is secondary. If you know ANYTHING about IPv6 you know that you make extensive use of DHCPv6 and DNS.

Great, how did the test turn out?  Surely as network admin you can carve out a small segment and test the theory and other frequently suggested work arounds to this scenario.  

> We use the latest UPDv6 and print exclusively from a Windows 2012R2 print server. 

Cool, but this is not an issue with the print driver or the print server.  Your printer is going to sleep because it is not receiving the kind of communication that it expects to keep itself awake on the LAN.  Likewise, once the printer is asleep it is not receiving the communication that it needs to wake up again.  Users work around this by touching the control panel or rebooting the machine.

You could also try disabling sleep mode as someone posted here:

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/LaserJet-Printing/Turn-off-printer-sleep-mode/td-p/6825644

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Printers-Archive-Read-Only/turn-off-sleep-mode/td-p/5785538

These posts are for different models but the general steps to adjust the sleep settings should apply to the M501.

[LPE397]

Oh how I love the "community."

Why would I configure a static IPv4 address and/or disable IPv6 when the very necessary constraint here is that I need to use both? Making it work in a non-standard way is not actually making it work. It just confirms that the device r firmware in this model has issues. I can safely say that because this is the ONLY model in my environment with this issue is the Pro m501. Since all printers in my 75+ device environment (with 5 different models represented) are effectively configured the exact same way then we can make the assumption that the issue is (again) the M501 model.

In lieu of an actual fix to the device not waking up without turning the device off and back on (note: just touching the buttons does not wake things up. The user must press and hold the power button for 10 seconds, and then power back up) I can just turn off the sleep mode.

And I guess a ticket with HP is in order.

[Repairatrooper]

Make sure that in the energy settings section that you have Lan activity set as one of the triggers to wake the printer. Options exist to turn off USB, Network or control panel. We had some units ship with no activity triggers so the machine would never wake up.