Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

[DansNetworks]

I have a customer with the Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 printer. It's worked fine for a few years, and then yesterday they reported that it gradually stopped working during the morning. When I remoted in, I found that I can ping the printer, I can view the WIM, I can even telnet to 9100 and send commands (and get a error response because I'm not sending the right commands), but I cannot add the printer to a PC and I can't print from PCs that already had the printer installed (95% of the time).

Maybe 3 times today it successfully printed test pages from different PCs, but then wouldn't print again. We tried changing the static IP of the printer, we changed network ports on the Cisco switch, rebooted the switch and the router. I had them check the protocols via the control panel and the only thing disabled is NetWare and Bonjour (disabled while I was testing, it's a Win7 only environment).

Any ideas? I'm leaning towards a hardware issue with the printer at this point, but there could be something I'm missing. We've power-cycled the printer several times, including unplugging from the wall. Any other diagnostics we can do?

[Zaxxon]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

Hook the printer up to your local pc directly with crossover cable and check if this is working.
9 out of 10 is some device with same IP address.

[logrady2331]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

You can open the command prompt, ping the MFP ip address, unplug the network cable and ping it again. If it pings with the MFP unplugged then you have a dual ip situation. Easiest and quickest way to run that test.

[logrady2331]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

You can open the command prompt, ping the MFP ip address, unplug the network cable and ping it again. If it pings with the MFP unplugged then you have a dual ip situation. Easiest and quickest way to identify dual ip's.

[DansNetworks]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

That's what I was thinking, but I changed the static IP of the printer and had the same results. Also, I could always browse to the printer via SMB (\\192.168.1.240) or see the WIM at http://192.168.1.240.

[DansNetworks]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

Good idea - I'll try that now.

[DansNetworks]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

Nope, when printer is unplugged, no ping response from 192.168.1.240.

[NeoMatrix]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

Sounds like the printer SDcard or the NIC is about to quit.

Add some extra stress to the NIC to test its communication.
Send a continuous ping command and watch for any differences in the echo.
You can use -n or -t with the ping command.

cmd.exe /k ping -n 50 192.168.1.240

[techsass]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

I'd run Sp5801 -8 (I think - it will say PRINTER) to reset the printer app & Sp5801-11 (NCS) to reset the NIC. It will wipeout any IP settings you have & put the NIC back to DHCP.

I do both of these anytime I have a printing issue & it resolves most of them.

[DansNetworks]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

We're going to let the printer vendor do a remote diagnosis to make sure we're not crazy, and then see what they want to do. Most of the printer vendors around here I've dealt with are fairly clueless, so we'll see what happens.

[Tonerbomb]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

take it off the wire and do all of these checks via crossover as suggested, before assuming it's the MFP... it could be as simple as a bad port on a switch..... been there done that, won in the end............. the controllers rarely fail like this in this model.............

OBTW is the frimwar current??????????????????????????????????????

[DansNetworks]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

We actually tried different ports on the switch - in fact, we swapped a port with a Samsung printer on the network that is working fine. Don't know about the firmware - it's worked for a couple of years with no issues, wonder what would have changed?

[anothertech]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

We're going to let the printer vendor do a remote diagnosis to make sure we're not crazy, and then see what they want to do. Most of the printer vendors around here I've dealt with are fairly clueless, so we'll see what happens.

I don't believe the vendor is qualified to determine if your crazy!

oh, btw, could it be a speed issue? Is it set to auto? try 100/full

[DansNetworks]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

We actually tried that - set the switch port to 10. It was negotiating to 10 anyways when it was auto, for some reason. I couldn't find where on the printer WIM to change that - where is that setting?

[Tonerbomb]

Re: Ricoh Aficio MP C4500 stopped printing

We actually tried that - set the switch port to 10. It was negotiating to 10 anyways when it was auto, for some reason. I couldn't find where on the printer WIM to change that - where is that setting?

The machines nic speed settings are done through the user tools system settings / interface settings, not available through the WIM and not like the old school Ricoh nics where it was \\ipaddress/speed.........................