Hi Spiceworks, I got a problem which I am struggling to understand/deal with.
I look after the computers/networks for a hospitality business. They rely on thermal printers to print receipts and order tickets.
The model of printer is Digipos DS900. Which appears to be a low cost mass market thermal printer.
Unfortunately they have been unreliable, they will randomly not print anything or take an extremely long time to print things (stuttering print). This causes all sorts of chaos as the kitchen is not aware of orders and the cash drawer sometimes does not kick and customers sometimes are held up for their receipts.
From what I can tell they are having some sort of network or processing issue. They are connected by ethernet. During troubleshooting I run pings to them and normally they respond back fine but eventually the pings will start timing out and when that happens they start having problems with printing.
Now what is weird is a couple of years ago I somehow worked out that turning off spanning tree on the switch ports they are connected to helps with the problem. It didn't remove every issue, sometimes it would still print slowly but at least it would always print.
Earlier this week there has been a reconfiguration of the network from adding a bunch of megapixel IP cameras and now even with spanning tree off on the ports I cannot get the printers to work reliably again.