JetDirect printer restarting in middle of large jobs

[Chris Howard]

We are printing some large jobs to a 9000-class HP LaserJet.

I have set up the queue with hppi.

It was working OK for a long time in one location.

I think it worked OK for a little while in the new location but now

doesn't work very well at all.  There are two printers

in the same room.  One works fine and the other does not.

It will get into the middle of a big print job and do a restart.

I am told it will sometime do this half a dozen times before

actually finishing the job.

I have tried toggling the -true-end-of-job and -job-recovery switches in hppi

but it doesn't seem to make a difference.

There is a firewall appliance between the server and the printers.

The server is running HP-UX 11.23

I guess I am looking for ideas, maybe some kind of tracing or logging

that I have not thought of.  I'd like to know why it is always restarting.

[jerrym]

Make sure the printer has the latest firmware. Since the move you may be hitting a know bug.

There is logging for printer queues. But I cannot remember where they are. You should be able to turn on logging for that printer queue in hppi. I do not have access to any of my old setups. Clues can be gotten from logs.  I ran into this problem long ago. I had to turn some feature off that was causing the problem.

[Bill Hassell]

Be sure to turn off True EOJ and Job recovery -- they simply don't work for HP-UX. Jobs are restarted when communication fails with the printer. The only log that means anything (the lp log is useless) is from the hpnpf program which actually talks to the printer. This can be eanbled by adding the hpnpf log option to the printer script BUT it may generate dozens of MB of log entries. Make sure the log file location has plenty of space. The only practical way is to print the large file manually using hpnpf.