lp print problem on old hpux 10.20

[Brian Harris]

I have network printers setup and have been working for years. I rebooted system and now every job I send using lp hangs. the prompt never comes back from issuing lp command. the network printers are using hpnpl and when I use that admin tool I can print to the printer.
I can find no error messages indicating why lp command never returns. Can anyone give me an idea on where to look

[Brian Harris]

Some Additional Information. When I try to due any lp command it seems to hang such as lpstat lpshut. The lpsched command is running. But when I look at the /var/adm/lp/log file its last line is STOPPED Aug 25 11:44 which is when I initially rebooted the system.

[Brian Harris]

I have fixed the problem, but not quite sure why it caused the problem. There were some fake printers defined to take output that customer no longer wanted printed, but did not want to change the code. So these printers had hundreds of request in them. When I deleted these request the lp system started to work again and the system performace improved.

[Pete Randall]

Did you happen to look at how full your file systems may have been, particularly /var? I don't think there is a limit on number of spool requests, but there is certainly a finite amount of space in a file system.


Pete

[Brian Harris]

Yes, While I don't remember what it was, it did have plenty of space. The only file system that was near full was /usr at 98% with 7.5 meg free. /var currently has 132 meg free.

[TTr]

> /var currently has 132 meg free.

But is it possible that, as Pete mentioned, /var was full before you cleaned up the hundreds of requests in the fake printers? You can check the syslog file for any "var full" error.

You should also "reject" the so called fake printers so that the users can not send print jobs to them.

[Brian Harris]

As stated before I don't rember exactly what it had, but it did have plenty of space. I am pretty sure that var had well over 40 meg free and maybe much more. I doubt that the request I deleted added to more than 40 meg.

As far as rejecting those request, I am a bit worried that it may cause problems with the programs trying to send them. Since this was done by someone else trying to get around issue that they no longer wanted that information printed