Printers disabling automatically

[Shibin_2]

Hello,

One of my customer environment, HP-UX 11iv2, almost 500 print queues, which are distributed in many HP-UX servers. One of the server randomly disables the print queues. The queues that are disabling automatically, won't be always same. When issuing the enable command, it starts processing the job. After a day or two, either this queue or some other queues shows the same behavior.

At the same time, the same print queues works perfectly in other servers. We have recently applied the lpspool cumulative patch (PHCO_36976 s700_800 11.23 ) for this issue. But, the problem persists.

Anybody have suggestions ? Thanks in advance.

[Khairy]

hi shibin,

i have encounter similar problem like your several years ago.

This happen when 10-12 printer queues continues to pump excessively spool files to the all the 10-12 print servers.

Network is another contribution why the printer queues are down. There are a timeout value for the printer queues to stop communicating with the printer or print servers.

What i did was, i create a script which enable the printer queues every 15 minutes and that did the trick.

Really appreciate if you could assign some points if this answer yr question.

Rgds

[Shibin_2]

Hi Khairy,

Yo don't bother about the points, I will assign it later stage.

Thanks for your prompt response. What I observed that, this print queues are mostly disabling during the night time. Because, customer complains at morning :D ..

So, other than a script, anything else, there could be something else ??

[OldSchool]

so...does somebody perhaps power down the printers overnight, or could a cleaning crew be unplugging them?

If the printer is "off" and you print to it, its gonna disable...

I'm wondering if "some" of the servers have print jobs at night and others don't.

as noted, you could construct a script that looks for disabled printers and enables them early in the day.

[Steve Reynolds]

I too have an environment with hundreds of
printers. I use the attached script (executed by cron), to check and enable
any printers that have become disabled.

[skt_skt]

"If the printer is "off" and you print to it, its gonna disable.."

that is NOT true ; rather the print jobs are accepted, queued. The queue never get disabled..

[OldSchool]

Santosh...that may be your experience. Mine, on 9.x, 10.2 and 11.0 differs.

[OldSchool]

in my case, the printers were inadvertantly connected to "switched" outlets (lights off then printers were powered down).

depending upon the print volume, the printer would disable...I suspect the root cause was the spool dir filled up, but I can't verify that at this time

[skt_skt]

printer offline(still accessible in network) and printer printer powered OFF are different. So defintly the result is different too like what me and u experienced

[skt_skt]

also i would recommend

check "ps -ef | grep lpsched" and see if there are too many a multiple daemon running ? kill them and restart the spooler in a maintenance window if possible