[Leica] Another failure of Epson 3800 printer

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

Fascinating.
I just spent the morning on the phone to Epson tech support working with 
them to get my 3800 printer going. Which it is.

They sure are suspicious of having any component in the system that wasn't 
manufactured by Epson. They wanted to blame my router for the Ethernet 
failure, but I knew they were going to say this (we've talked before) so I 
was ready with a 50-foot-long crossover cable. And when I told them I had a 
Fluke NetTool Series II connected to that cable, they got very nervous and 
asked me to remove it so that it would not try to control the printer. 
Whatever. While I'm on the phone to them, I'll do it 
their way.

After an amazing number of button pushes and reconfigurations and power 
cycles and resets, we did manage to get the thing to where it could print a 
nozzle check. But then it died in the middle of the nozzle check. After 
another 10 minutes of mucking about with Epson Net Config and hundreds of 
button pushes on the printer's control panel, the darn thing is printing 
photographs again.

I know it's going to stop working again next Sunday afternoon. The real test 
will be whether or not I can repeat the ritual of button pushes that managed 
to reset the electronics and get it working again.

Intermittent failures of electronic devices are almost always hardware 
problems and not software problems, but clearly there is a software sequence 
that can reset the flaky device (until it flakes again).

For the tech-minded among you: it comes up with an IP address of 
169.254.183.253 and won't DHCP or take reconfiguration from the panel. But 
the Bonjour protocols let Epson Net Config talk to it without needing an IP 
address, and then Epson Net Config can send a layer-2 message to its MAC 
address that instructs it to set its IP and netmask properly. Then you 
delete and reinstall the print driver and it's a printer again.