Technical Memo: HP 4000/5000 Printer Firmware Incompatibility





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HP 4000/5000 PRINTER FIRMWARE INCOMPATIBILITY

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Abstract

The following document gives technical information regarding incompatible firmware versions for the HP 4000/5000 model printers.

Problem Synopsis:

With the release of the HP 4000/5000 printers, there is a known problem in the "backchannel" conversation conducted by ScriptServer for OpenVMS when starting a queue. While these issues were fixed with the release of ScriptServer 5.1-4, some HP 4000/5000 printers still exhibit problems when trying to start a ScriptServer queue on them. The most common symptoms reported are failure of the queue to start and jobs hanging at end-of-file, i.e. "awaiting completion."

The Solution

The problem is the result of incompatible versions of the fimware residing in the printer. In order for ScriptServer to work properly with the HP 4000/5000 printers with the backchannel enabled, the following firmware (or later revisions) should be installed in the printer.

      		Firmware Datecode:  980311 MOBY3.65

Once this version of the firmware is installed into the HP 4000/5000 printers, you should not encounter any further problems configuring queues with ScriptServer 5.1-4 or later. While the ScriptServer PAN Printing System utilizes different semantics when communicating with printers and no problems have been reported, you should still be aware of this potential firmware incompatibility.

Contact HP's Customer Care Center to get an updated firmware DIMM for your printer. Their number is 208-323-2551. Until your firmware is upgraded, you can use the previous version of SSV$EPS2FORM.EXE (V1.6) to create a compatible electronic form for use with ScriptServer for OpenVMS.