LU3 Print Jobs May Fail to Print After Initial Job Completes (180149)

SYMPTOMS

When you print multiple LU3 host print jobs to an SNA Server system, the second print job may fail to print. In addition, SNA Server will terminate the print session, which causes the printer logical unit (LU) on the host to be deactivated.

This problem occurs when the second print job is not preceded by a BID command from the host. In this case, the second print job begins with the first part of the actual print data. SNA Server will log the following event in the Windows NT Application Event log when the problem occurs:

   Event ID: 12
   Source: SNA Server
   Description: (1118) Negative Response from Remote System (SENSE = 4011)

CAUSE

When SNA Server receives first portion of the print data for the second print job, it sends it to the print server. The print server responds with a BID ACK (Acknowledgement). Because the second print job did not begin with a BID message, SNA Server never sent a BID to the print server, so it responds to this message with an error. The error message contains a sense code of 4011. Sense Code 4011 is defined in the IBM SNA Formats Guide (GA27- 3136).

The print server responds with a BID ACK message because the LU3 printing code assumes that anything it receives that causes the Winvprt.dll file to start a print job is a BID message. This causes it to always respond with a BID ACK at the beginning of a new LU3 print job.

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in SNA Server versions 3.0, 3.0 SP1, 3.0 SP2, and 4.0.

This problem was corrected in the latest SNA Server versions 3.0 and 4.0 U.S. Service Packs. For information on obtaining these Service Packs, query on the following word in the Microsoft Knowledge Base (without the spaces):

S E R V P A C K