11.31 and printing

[donna hofmeister]

this is an 11.31 system printing via hppi to laser jet printers.

everything is actually printing just fine....except for one thing.  the user are accustomed to being able to press the "cancel" button on the printer to kill (active) print jobs coming from the hpux system -- and this is no longer working.  (this works from older hpux systems...)

is this an 11.31 feature?  or something that can be tweaked?  (the whole web jetadmin/smh path isn't considered acceptable as it would involve asking the users to change their habits (egad))

[Dennis Handly]

Is cancel ignored or does it restart from the beginning?

[donna hofmeister]

restart from the beginning  

[Dennis Handly]

>restart from the beginning 

Do you have Job Recovery on?

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/System-Administration/Can-t-print-to-network-printer/m-p/4887590/

[donna hofmeister]

did you maybe mean this link?

http://h30499.www3.hp.com/t5/Software/Job-Recovery-amp-True-End-of-Job-in-HPPI-JetDirect-E-10-34/td-p/4358554#.UClbSbR5F8E

anyhow....let me find out....

[Dennis Handly]

>did you maybe mean this link?

Well, it is probably a better explanation.  I wanted one from Bill so at least we know how to spell the option.

[donna hofmeister]

In this case the key factor seems to be TEOJ. If TEOJ is on, regardless of the Job-Recovery setting, the print job simply starts over from the beginning, eternally, until canceled on the HP-UX system. When TEOJ is turned off, regardless of the Job-Recovery setting, user canceling of the print job at the LaserJet works as hoped. The job stops printing and the spoolfile is deleted from the HP-UX spooler.

thanks!

[Bill Hassell]

Sorry for the late reply. The recommendation is to setup all printers using HPPI with True End-of-Job off, and job recovery off. The code is convoluted in hpnpf (the network transport program for HPPI) and TEOJ causes a lot of problems due to the differences in handling the thousands of HP models (and some non-HP) too. The purpose of TEOJ is to wait until the last page of a print job hits the paper tray. This requires interacting with the printer since multiple pages may have been buffered in memory. The printer is queried over and over to see if the last page is finished.

But the issue is with consistent implementation of this feature. The most common failure is that only one job prints at a time, then the printer has to be taken offline or the print job manually cancelled. The reason is that the printer is incompatible with the EOJ protocol. This can be seen by turning on network tracing in hpnpf and watching the end of the print job.

Similarly, job recovery is also fairly useless. As mentioned, it will endlessly try to reprint a job from the beginning due to any glitch during printing. Most commonly, a bad network connection will generate hundreds of duplicate pages until the HP-UX sysadmin cancels the job. The potential for wasted paper isn't worth the one or two times where a small job needs to be restarted.

Turn off both options.

Since using sam or hppi (which is called by sam) is clunky for adding/deleting JetDirect printers, I always use addqueue like this:

addqueue -h 12.34.56.78 -q myprintq -r off -t off -b off 

Just the one liner and you get the printer operational. NOTE: HP-UX's print spooler must be halted to add/delete or change a printer definition. On a big system with lots of printers, do NOT make changes until active printing is finished. The spooler is shutdown and when restarted, all incomplete jobs will start over.

For non-HP printers that support port 9100 *AND* PCL 5c and lower, this works well too although you will have to specify a model script to use with -i, typically -i 257 which selects the net_ljx000 script.

[donna hofmeister]

thus st. hassell spoketh :-)

thanks!

Spoiler

[Dennis Handly]

>thanks!

Are you going to back up your thanks with Kudos?  ;-)