We recently moved from a Open VMS OS to HP-UX. When printing labels on Intermec 3400 printers we are seeing a delay of up to 3 minutes before labels print. We have printers going through a DEC Term servers and Jet Direct boxes. Any suggestions what might be causing this delay?

3 minute delay automatically triggers the thought "reverse DNS lookup".

For example telnet server trying to lookup the hostname of the client from the IP. Perhaps your print server is trying similar.

It seems to me that reverse DNS lookup might help explain why they process once 3 min has past but does not explain why they don't process right away.

I'll give the telnetd example, then try and relate it to a print server.

1. client connects to server

2. inetd does accept, forks, execs telnetd

3. telnetd does getpeername() and gethostbyaddr()

4. gethostbyaddr hangs for 3 minutes until times out if can't resolve name

5. telnetd continues with login

perhaps your printer server is trying to do a address to name lookup on receipt of a print job for some logging purposes.

In the case of the telnetd solution it's normally a problem with /etc/resolv.conf

Hi there,

I just found your post, and as it is my first day being signed up on here i thought i might aswell leave a few comments here and there. I can't really say that label printing has ever been my strongest point. I brought a label printer a while back but it never worked right as i could never get my address labels to print out exactly how i wanted them to. In the end i ended up throwing out my label printer and using a british labels company instead to print my labels as it saved me so much time and hassle.