Odd Issue with HP printers
Answered
This may seem odd but I recently upgraded my NXWitness to 4.1.0.31398 running on Ubuntu 16.04.7 and after a few weeks noticed issues with a HP m570 printer faulting with peripheral fatal error 49 and gets stuck in a reboot cycle. Thought this was related to the PC that most often prints to it as when we unplugged the printer from the network it would stop rebooting itself. A couple days later we had the same issue with two other HP m570 printers. As the panic started setting in, I started blocking communication with the printer using MAC filtering on our network switches. Eventually narrowing it down to the VM running NXWitness. I caulked it up to a possible issue with the HP M570 printers as this was the only model being affected even though the printer firmware hadn't been recently updated. A month further goes by and we start seeing the same error on two of our HP m425 printers. Again blocking communication from the NXWitness VM to these two MAC addresses blocked the issue.
So long story.. My assumption is that something has changed in NXWitness (possibly the scanning for cameras) is causing the printers to fault. I also have attempted to disable all non-essential protocols on the printers as a troubleshooting measure to make sure it wasn't a specific one related to the problem.
If anyone could shed some light on what could be happening and what I may do to fix this properly, I would much appreciate it.
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Official comment
Hi Jason,
Obviously each release of Nx contains features, bug-fixing, and improvements, but as far as I know, there is nothing changed that could influence other equipment in a network.
Nx does have auto-discovery enabled in the Systems Administration menu, tab General. I would try and see if the issue stops when you disable this function.
In general this would be a bug related to the HP printer, since Nx Witness isn't the only software that probes the network for available devices, and they might cause similar issues.
If you still encounter such issues when you disabled the feature, it might be useful to capture the communication towards the printer. Starting with the Nx server seems sensible in this case. HERE some guidance.
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Thank you for the reply Norman. You know I had a look to switch off auto-discovery and couldn't find it but it was staring me right in the face, haha. I have done some Wireshark captures but didn't see anything obviously wrong but saying that I think I'd require a near endless amount of time more experience with Wireshark to really understand what I'm looking for there.
I agree with you that the issue more than likely is the fault of HP (I despise printers and there lack of proper security and firmware updates), that is why I hesitated to ask questions until the issue started happening to other models. It is strange that the issues did not present themselves straight away either.
The other possibility is that it is an update with the Ubuntu VM that is causing the issue.
I will disable the auto-discovery and see if that helps things for the next few days and will report back.
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Hi Jason Hurd,
Please update us in a few days. We are just as curious if that resolved the issue.
Never hesitate to ask anything that might be related to any issue that might be related to our software.Regarding Wireshark, this is the Leatherman tool for anyone working with network connected devices and it seems hard in the beginning, but with a little persistence, you can make it a very useful tool and you notice you will use it more frequently that you ever imagined.
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Hello Norman
I now have removed the MAC Filtering block to the NXWitness server to all six HP printers that I have had issues with. So far I haven't had an issue since disabling auto-discovery and camera status checks, however, since this has been such a random issue I will give it another week before attempting to switch on the auto-discovery to see if the issues start again.0
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