Re: AS-400 TCP3436 Error when printing remotely

There has been prior discussion here about problems with some PCs losing their AS/400 connection, when the network thinks it has gone inactive, which can be a big hassle for the users who wanted to keep the connection. Solutions include adjustments to time out and time out rules. There's also a hardware solution to help the non-IBM parts of a network stay connected longer.

Sometimes we cannot continue a print job until some crazy error message has been detected and cured. A printer can be reset by ... stop it, vary it off, wait a inute, vary it on, start it, re-align it, which in the process clears all unresolved error messages and starts over ... it would be nice if all those steps could go into a CL on a menu so an end user could just take one option labeled "KICK THE PRINTER CONNECTION" or something, so they not need to have to know all the OS commands involved.

We have had similar programs with less remote sites.

(a) A printer can have a buffer ... The AS/400 sends several pages to the printer, which takes a while to actually print. During the printing, a human turns off the printer power to fix the alignment. The buffer loses unprinted pages that the AS/400 thinks have been printed ... so everything we send remote printers are SAVE(*YES) after printing to support reprint just in case.

(b) The cheapest purchase price on printers is to attach the printer to a PC and the PC to AS/400. This means for the AS/400 to print to the printer, the PC must be powered on with a configuration that is consistent across printer, PC, and AS/400.

There's stuff the PC user can be doing that means the AS/400 is no longer talking to the printer.

Staff think printers are interchangeable without doing anything. While the AS/400 config is smart enough to do plug & play on connected peripherals, often the PCs and printers are not, so we can get a configuration conflict, and the only thing people notice is that the printers are not working any more.

Once a printer has been setup and is working, the settings, and how to get at them, should be documented some place easy to find by people at both ends, translated into our language and theirs, so that if the configuration gets messed up, people can rapidly check all the places supposed to have settings, make sure they are all correct.

We used to have PCs and printers with a bad habit of dropping configuration data ... like unplug and unplay.

Are these defined as *lan printers? or remote writers?
Are you talking directly to the printers, or thu a print server product on pc/network
or Client Access printer definition, or something like Jet Direct hardware box the printer is connected to?
Would check the network timeout value on the printer itself. IBM Knowledge Base used to (and may still have) docs on recommended values for various configurations. Make sure both printer & system are consistent and using recommended values. I have had similar issues when network setup is inconsistent on remote side.
Jim Franz

---- "Bollinger wrote:
> Hello All!
>
> We have an IBM AS400 in Minnesota and a remote office in Hong Kong that we are printing to. It seems that every night (their day) we can ping their printer but the AS400 cannot print to it and gets stuck in send mode.
> Now we have 4 printers out there and it doesn't happen to them all, it is usually just one a night. At around 6am it will begin working again.
>
> We get the following error:
> TCP3436
> Message . . . . : No response from remote host system within open time-out.
>
> I'm wondering if anybody has a solution to this? It doesn't seem to be network given we can print to the other printers out there. If we try toggling off and on the device it still won't work.
>
> Thanks,
> Kristine Bollinger
> The Bergquist Company
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <Bonnie_Lokenvitz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Sent: Tuesday, March 09, 2004 7:18 AM
> Subject: Remote Printer - What do I ask Network guy to check on his side?
>
>
> >
> >
> > Still at V4R5 and still operator-less.
> >
> > We have several Intermec 3400's setup as remote writers.
> > CRTOUTQ with connection type *IP and the IP address. Added another
> > yesterday.
> >
> > The As/400 print stays in send mode and this error appears in QSPL job:
> >
> > TCP3436
> > Message . . . . : No response from remote host system within open
> > time-out.
> > Cause . . . . . : An open request was sent to a remote host system, but
> > that
> > host system did not respond to the request before the open time-out
> > expired.
> > This may be due to the fact that the TCP/IP services are not currently
> >
> > available on the remote host system.
> >
> >
> > The network admin says he can ping it so there's no problem. VFYTCPCNN
> > from AS/400 also works. Where else should we be looking?
> >
> > Thanks much,
> > Bonnie Lokenvitz
> > Engineered Polymers
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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