Load Balancing - Printing Errors

I'm having trouble getting Print Distributor 4 working. I'm building a Photo Booth Kiosk that utilizes two identical Mitsubishi Photo Printers, Model CP9550D/DW. They work fine individually but when setting up a load balancing virtual printer I'm getting an error that seems to be crashing the windows print spooler. The OS is Windows XP SP2 on a dell laptop with a fresh load of the OS.

Program Error Log:

Date Time Description
29/08/2007 16:51 Error: 1722 The RPC server is unavailable. in c:\data\source code\pd3\source/printers.h at 38
29/08/2007 17:22 Error: 1722 The RPC server is unavailable. in c:\data\source code\pd3\source\printers.h at 144

Set-up XML file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
- <Settings>
- <Ports>
- <Port>
- <ActionList>
<Label>MultiSpooler</Label>
<EnableLoadBalancing>false</EnableLoadBalancing>
<UID>{A83D9D90-25F5-4E82-A9C4-64244C98035F}</UID>
- <Actions>
- <LoadBalancing>
<UID>{C430522E-E060-4E2F-AD77-08A8A0E9D057}</UID>
- <Actions>
- <RePrint>
<PrinterName>MITSUBISHI CP9550D/DW(USB) PRT1</PrinterName>
<SpoolPausedJob>false</SpoolPausedJob>
</RePrint>
- <RePrint>
<PrinterName>MITSUBISHI CP9550D/DW(USB) PRT2</PrinterName>
<SpoolPausedJob>false</SpoolPausedJob>
</RePrint>
</Actions>
</LoadBalancing>
</Actions>
</ActionList>
</Port>
</Ports>
</Settings>

Please help, this is a project that has to ship soon.

Regards,

Ken

Ken,

Open the Printers folder in Windows and right click on the virtual printer. Select the Properties menu and go to the Ports tab. Make sure "Enable bidirectional support" is off.

Tony,

That did it! Thanks for the quick response. One other question though, how would it get the load balancing to print to both printers simultaneously? The idea for two printers was to reduce the total print time for the experience. For example when a group of people go through the kiosk they pick the number of people in their group and the system then prints that quantity. If the software could print the images in parallel that would be fantastic.

If everything goes as planned I'd be glad to tell you who the product is for. I can tell you it is for a kiosk at Wired's NextFest in L.A. Sept. 11-16.

Regards,

Ken

Maybe next time I will read the documentation better, the program interface is very clean and straightforward.

I'm assuming you are getting one print job on the queue with the count embedded in it. Unfortunately we don't have any way to split that across muliple printers.

If you can get your application to print a separate job for each copy then that would get balanced.