We have recently acquired two new Boca printers, our first new ticket printers in many years. These new printers are equipped with an ethernet port, unlike the old ones, which we connect to the network via JetDirect. The old ones that still work print fine, but the new ones are running into some issues which are new to us. We have been in touch with Boca, but after a little correspondence they are throwing up their hands.
The issue manifests itself with large batch jobs. We get occasional blank, completely missed tickets, but in some cases only elements within the ticket are left blank, e.g. barcodes, text elements like the production title, price type, etc. We sometimes see elements double printed and overlaying each other. All of these tickets can be un-printed and printed again without issue, as long as we don't print too many at a time.
This feels like the queue is getting overloaded somehow, but this is just a guess.
TIA for any suggestions.
I could copy and paste Chris Jensen's post almost in its entirety and paste it as my own. We simply have not had a chance to reach out to Boca yet.
So, basically. Ditto. Not really helpful, but you are not alone!
John A. Moskal II
Hey Chris,
We have the USB Boca printers but one thing that helped us was to 'cancel all documents' in the printer settings. Its greyed out in this screenshot but should be an option if you have documents stuck in the queue.
Thanks, but we get nothing stuck in the queue. If there are more than approx. 30-40 tickets in a batch, some don't print correctly as above, but none get stuck.
Interesting. We will investigate this...
Ira Sibulkin said:I'd check that both ends of the Boca connection are manually set to the same speed and duplex.
We tried this and sadly, the issues continue to occur. A long pause during printing; missing elements; double/overprinted elements.
John A. Moskal II said:We simply have not had a chance to reach out to Boca yet.
We are still having issues with our new Bocas, and are about to re-engage on the issue. Have you made any progress at your org, John?
That would be a no, unless you count additionally verifying that the issue is not strictly limited to batch printings but also rears its head on large print single orders, too. Sorry.
Thanks, John.
I don't have any recommendations -- but we're in the exact same boat. New printer can't handle large batch jobs. We've been working with both BOCA and Tess support, and have not gotten anywhere.
David Harvey said:We've been working with both BOCA and Tess support, and have not gotten anywhere.
Same here re: working w Tess & Boca. Good to know we aren't alone in our frustration. Am starting to fear that these Lemurs just don't work properly over Ethernet, maybe over anything.
Wishing we could diagnose exactly what the crucial difference is between them and our old Bocas (Ethernet to serial via JetDriect and working properly).
I did that as an early recommendation in the troubleshooting documentation. No effect on the issue. Thank you for the suggestion.
Hello Chris and everyone else on this thread. Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. We are tracking down what appears to be an issue with the ethernet connection of newer Bocas (the Lemur-S has been the one we've heard about from some members) and ask that if you are experiencing problems with large batch jobs that submit and help ticket so we can update you and track these.
A possible work around may be connecting your Boca via USB, and then sharing it over the network that way, instead of via Ethernet. But please submit a ticket so we can help you work through your individual issue (the forums are a messy place to try and diagnose and troubleshoot these sorts of things!).
Thank you once again Chris and everyone else for calling this out!
Just adding to the list (solidarity) that our ethernet boca decided to not want to work as it had been about a week ago (ticket is in), and now we're fiddling with usb connections instead, and sometimes a pc doesn't want to recognize it as a printer and all that jazz (I know the whole thing about generic drivers, etc, it's just all very fussy). Fun times.
Welcome to this thread; solidarity indeed.
While we wait for a better fix, we've connected our two Boca Lemurs to a PC via USB and are sharing them over the network from there, and have seen better results, i.e. no more overprints, no more missing elements, etc.. Still a few extra blank tickets.
This is not an acceptable long-term solution, but for now, we are back 1990's printer sharing tech, and at least we can use our new printers.