Disabled printers

[Yvonne Butler]

Does anyone know what would cause Unix to change a printer to be disabled? I have one printer in particular setup as a BSD printer and every now and again it gets changed to disabled and the print jobs queue up. Once I enable the printer everything is fine for some time. Any suggestions please?

[Stefan Farrelly]

HP-UX only disables the queue because it received a bad return status from the printer when it tried to talk to it. You can see the exact return status which caused the queue to become disabled in the lp log in /var/adm/lp.

[Geoff Wild]

There are a number of reasons that the printer can become disabled, covering the whole range from spooler to hardware issues, so it's not often easy to diagnose a cause.

Cause could be when the submission to a remote printer via rlp returns a non-zero exit status. Usually, they are an indication the remote printer was reset while printing the job.

If the /usr/sbin/rlp command used to send the print to the printer returns anything other than a 0 it disables the printer.

Rgds...Geoff

[Graham Cameron_1]

This used to happen to us all the time, until we put in a crontab entry...

0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/enable lp1 lp2 lpetc

-- Graham

[Chris Wilshaw · Accepted solution]

Once possibility is that the printer is suffering from a timeout.

On our systems, we have a file /etc/ddfa/lp_pcf which controls the serially attached printers.

This file normally contains the line

telnet_timer: 120

However, we have had a couple of issues in the past where we've had to increase this value.

More details can be found in the pcf man page.

[Yvonne Butler]

Thanks everyone. Turns out Chris was right, the timeout setting needed extending as this printer is also used by a windows system so I've set the timeout to a more realistic figure to incorporate the windows queue as well.

[Bruno Ganino]

When it happens, if printing is remote printing, to verify that the remote system and its spooler are in execution, to verify that printing is qualified on the remote systems and local, to verify that the daemon of the spooler remote it is in execution on the remote system.
You can consult /var/adm/lp/log for possible indications on the problem.
Bruno