Lukas Beeler’s IT Blog

ExcelliPrint is an excellent tool for IPDS->PCL conversion, and i’ve written about it many times before.

But it is only as good as it’s users. A customer called me with a strange problem, related to ExcelliPrint. He told me that he can print on the System i just fine, but the print job just vanishes into thin air. The System i showed the file as being printed, but it was nowhere to be seen on the Windows machine.

I asked the customer if he changed anything recently, he told me no. I’ve used Netviewer to access the customers servers, and have a look at ExcelliPrints logfiles.

At that point, the problem was obious: ExcelliPrint complained that the printer name was invalid. I checked this against the installed printers, and of course the printer ExcelliPrint had another name. After selecting the correct printer, ExcelliPrint continued working just fine and reliable as always.

When asking the customer why he renamed printers, and didn’t tell me that he just said “I didn’t think it mattered”. So much.