Showing printer errors on remote screen

[Xaviea Bell]

Hi I am new to this and I obviously have a question. I want to set up the capability to have the printer's errors/exceptions (out of paper, printer jam) mailed to me or have a way for me to check every so often to see if it has had any errors. Any help with this will be perfect. Thanks

[Phil Crooker · Accepted solution]

Are you using HPDPS (HP Distributed Print Service)? Although this system is quite a hassle to configure, you can get these types of errors to be emailed.

To start, have a look at "What is HPDPS" under Printers and Plotters / HPDPS in SAM, they are reasonably detailed.

Good luck.

[Mauro Gatti]

I think you can also try to use snmp trap mechanism.

RGDS


Mauro

[Bill Hassell]

Printers are disabled whenever the printer script returns a non-zero exit code. There is no mechanism in lp to send a mail message so you would have to modify each of the printer scripts to use a trap for all signals (including zero which is a normal exit) and check for the condition. lp printing is very primitive so paper jams or out of paper are not detected because printing is one-way. Now with HP's JetDirect connections, you have a lot more options in the interface script and the hpnpadmin tool can provide a lot of details. But none of these changes will catch a user that manually disables the printer (the disable command).

So the best solution is to create a script that uses lpstat to find problems. Start with lpstat -r and make sure the scheduler is actually running--send an email message if not. Then check the status of each printer. NOTE: lpstat -t will give you detailed info on all printers but for remote printers where the server is not working right, it will delay for 30 seconds or so.

[Xaviea Bell]

Thanks to everyones help. I am going to set up the HPDPS system because I didnt realize it exsited and it sounds very helpful. For the time being I am going to try the script. Thanks once again.