February 12, 2003
What We've Become

As I've mentioned before, I work for a school district near where I live. Each school in the district has one or two of "us" at their disposal. I was having a problem the other day with one of the iMacs (9.2.2) and decided to send an email out to my peers to ask for assistance.

Anyone have any idea why an iMac would see half of the printers on the network when I open the chooser one time, the other half when I open it again, and none when I open it a third time?

Also, it cannot print to any of these printers.

And some lovely responses I received.

Reason: because its a mac :)
 
I'm sorry i cant help, never had that problem.. nor do i know even how to go about fixing it.. maybe [another tech] knows something.

And this next one is a serious response.

There is not enough space in the Chooser Box for all printers to be displayed at once.
 
It's one of those things!

Finally...

Sounds like it's dying a slow death.  Kick the imac out the door.  Did I just say that???

I did of course get some very good responses. One saying they had the exact same problem and suggested it might be the T1 line. His problem was also that email (via outlook client) was extremely slow. Same at my school! Another one mentioned the Cat 5 cable may be "cut" somewhere (very possible). And finally, someone suggested setting TCP/IP to always loaded. I haven't had a chance to try the uhm... responses I didn't paste word for word from their email yet.

Digg This!

 Posted by rosyna at February 12, 2003 08:23 AM

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On the iMac turn off Appletalk and then turn it back on again. If the printers then show up it is do to Spanning Tree Protocol being on in the network hubs.

There is no fix for this other then to turn off Spanning Tree Protocol in the hubs.

Do a search over at Apple on Spanning Tree Protocol for more information on this.

Posted by: Terri on February 12, 2003 9:23 AM

This might not be related to your problem but it comes to mind as another weird AppleTalk problem:
I recently saw a case in a small customer network (5 Macs + 1 Printer) where the automatic address allocation of AppleTalk wasn't working! Two machines (9.2.2) had the same AppleTalk address which led to all kinds of trouble of course. Took me awhile to figure that one out. I solved it by assigning a manual address on one of the machines. I still don't know the cause. Bad cabeling? A bad switch? OS Bug?

Posted by: Mike on February 12, 2003 2:18 PM

I've seen that too. On larger networks I've found that shutting down everything and then turning everything back on seems to fix it, but it will sometimes return after a month or two.

Posted by: Terri on February 12, 2003 5:05 PM

As sad before , you can't put on the spanning tree protocol on a network with a lot of Appletalk machine.
This is a shortcomming of this protocol .But Netbui has it's shortcommings to. She before hacking on a system , remind that this was the first networkprotocol the that could set up a net work easy . It even could use services on a network . It took a long time before netbui could do this, en certainly not in the same easy why.
THE SOLUTION IS : RendezVous based on the open source ZEROCONFIG. Apple will replace appletalk with Rendezvous .http://developer.apple.com/macosx/rendezvous/
This has the same possibilty as appletalk but work with TCP/IP and the Spanning Tree Protocol can be used again .

This as info
Greetings
Bernard

Network Administrator assitant

Posted by: Bernard on June 8, 2003 5:19 AM
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