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Kitchen printer - Printing half the ticket

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Hugove:
@rvandam - I dont use serial printers, all my connections are parallel or USB or Parallel to USB. When you say: "I is worth to look for a network tcp to parallel adapter" is this an adapter that converts parallel to CAT5/6 RJ 45 ?

Just to update you all and for those who might suffer a similar strange problem, things are working OK now but using workarounds. Here goes:

As the printer got knocked off by power failures computer restarts etc and would only come back online when a test print was sent to it I wrote a script that on automatically sends a test print to the printer when the computer/windows starts up. I used windows task scheduler to execute the following script:

RUNDLL32 PRINTUI.DLL,PrintUIEntry /n"kp" /k

Its been a month with no real problems, but not the way I would like it to be.

@JohnS When you say "Windows networking" how is that different to homegroups etc?

Thanks

JohnS:
Homegroups was introduced in Vista. It was a simplified way to share resources. But as with most things about Vista, it didn't behave fully as expected. Homegroups is built on top of Windows Networking.

In Win7 it got better, but was still problematic.

With Windows Networking, if you have mapped network drives, and restart a computer, you will more often then not get a message that "There are disconnected network drives" or something similar. This is because Windows has not opened any files from that share and therefore thinks it's not there, but when you click on the drive, it's connected. Homegroup will see this as an issue and that's when things stop working properly.

The way I setup printer sharing means I don't even need the printer drivers locally installed for a computer to use a remote printer. Yes the computer that shares the printer will need the drivers loaded, but then all computers will print to it by using a share name like "\\POS01-PC\RECEIPT".

Now there is a little more to it than that, like turning off some security around sharing, but I almost never experience any issues with printing. In fact I have one site that has been running for over 18mths without any printing issues and all their terminals (which have USB printers) run off wifi, and with the Kitchen Printer running ethernet. They have blackouts, and even renovations more recently and have had no issues at all.

I am currently working on a setup guide to help people setup SambaPOS from scratch on a server, with physical terminals, Windows tablets and RDP clients (iPad, iPhone, etc) all using shared printers. This will fully cover the printer setup and sharing.

Hugove:
John,

Thanks again, Would really like a copy of that. Do you suggest not using home groups at all? does this then mean that we need to create dedicated ip addresses to each terminal?

Things have been OK since the workaround but thinking about migrating to V3, I read that there is no tool available for this. I guess the tables structures of V3 is very different?

Let me know

regards

Hugo 

JohnS:
I don't use Home Groups at all. I only use static IP's on servers, you can use DHCP for the rest and share by their NetBIOS name, ie POS01-PC

Yes, the DB's are very different. I have looked at creating a migration tool, and it is a big job.

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