M404 Wake Issues

[BroadcastStorm]

Hello everyone,

I've been having an issue with multiple M404 printers on our network and I've run out of ideas. For starters, I work for a company that has a metropolitan area network that spans to 20 locations across the city. We have several HP printer models installed in various places. We recently started purchasing HP LaserJet Pro M404dn's and quickly noticed a strange sleep/wake issue out of the box.

If the printer sits idly for longer than 24 hours, it intermittently doesn't receive print jobs when someone sends a job to it over the network. The user, then, has to restart the printer. After that, the user can print to it. 

I've caught the printer in this weird state every once and a while and couldn't ping it. It is always in a sleep mode when it happens. My guess is that it's working but something on the network/firmware side is making it drop its networking. When this issue happens, it acts like the host name isn't on our internal DNS server anymore. I can reach it via an IP address but can't reach it via the host name. Other times, I could get to the EWS via host name. What's funny is, sometimes when I go to the EWS, if kicks the printer in gear and fixes the issue.

Another strange issue with these printers is that their packet loss is higher than any other device we have on our network. If I leave ping running on an M404, it will return with 5% packet loss on average. Before changing the 802.3 speed settings, it was as high as 25% packet loss.

How these printers are set up:

• They are set up as DHCP but have DHCP reservations on our server.
• We are a Windows 10 environment. Users print via a driver that's pointed to the host name of the printer.
• Every printer is set up over gigabit ethernet, we do not run any printer over WiFi
• We've turned off Bonjour and LLMNR as they were not needed.

What we've tried to fix this issue:

• Upgrade to the newest firmware
• Set each printer to have a DHCP reservation on our DHCP server
• Set the 802.3 speeds to 100 Full Duplex (this made our ping packet loss better for some reason)
• Set the auto shutdown to 8 hours and have it never shut down when the network port is active (I can't completely turn this off.)
• Set the sleep settings to 15 minutes
• Setting the IP as a static IP on the printer (tried this on one printer but it didn't make a difference)

Right now, I'm completely out of ideas. If there isn't a solution, I think our users would be fine with rebooting, but that isn't ideal for some people. I'm sure a temporary fix that may or may not make it better would be to set the Windows 10 drivers to point to the printer using its IP and not its host name. But, we want to avoid static IPs all together on our network. So, this wouldn't really work for us.

Thank you and let me know if there's anything anyone can think to try!

[ShlomiL]

Hi,

Please try disabling IPv6 from the EWS page and check if that may make any difference, it can be found on the Network tab.

Also, try following below specific version of the HP Print and Scan Doctor Utility by selecting your printer:

http://ftp.hp.com/pub/printers/hppsdr/patches/HPPSdr.exe

Be sure to restart your PC and allow the utility to complete the process, then check for any difference.

Try printing and check for any change, if the same remains try printing using the newly added print queue copy (Copy1) and check for any difference.

Shlomi

[BroadcastStorm]

Hello, thanks for the speedy response. I forgot to mention in my post that we also have IPv6 turned off, sorry about that. It didn't seem to make a difference. 

I will have to double check to run the software on our user's computers. We are very restricted on what software can be run on our computers.