Effect of Stopping/Starting LP Spooler on Currently Printing Jobs

[Zinky]

Has anyone investigated the effects on say very large print jobs when the printing subsystem is restarted in the course say of adding a printer or moving print jobs from one printer to another? Will it restart the currently printing job from page 1 or will it be allowed to continue on even if there is a signa to stop the spooler?

Our printers are simply configured as remote to the printer's network card acting as print server.. No JetDirect/xpadmin,etc software in between between our UNIX hosts and the thousand or so different brands of printers.


Thanks.

[Pete Randall]

Hi Harley Man!

Using SAM to stop the print spooler, you get a warning which says

"There is currently one output request that is either being printed on a local printer or is being sent to a remote printer. Stopping the spooler before this request has completed will result in the request being reprinted or resent."

I interpret that to mean that the job would begin again at page one.


Pete

[Geoff Wild]

It will restart any incomplete jobs from
the beginning.

The native spooler just isn't robust enough - wasn't ever intended to be.

What you could do, is disable all print queues, wait for any current jobs to finish, then stop the spooler.

Rgds...Geoff

[Zinky]

lpshut however does not issue any warning.

Geoff, disabling will do no good to flush all printers. I think "reject" is the proper way to do this - it'll present any jobs from being queued but whatever is already onthe queue will get printed.

We usually get requests to move print jobs from one printer to another. And to do this, we lpshut, lpmove srcprinter destprinter, lpsched. We have not actually received any complaints but I guess by the behaviour of lp -- currently printing jobs do indeed get reprinted.

Lately however, we found a trick to move print jobs from one printer to another w/o bringing down the spooler:

disable srcprntr
cd /var/spool/lp/request/srcprntr
for file in d*;do
lp -ddstprntr $file
done
cancel -e srcprntr

On the destination printer though the printjobs are listed with no indication of what jobs/files they are.


Any othere ideas on moving print jobs w/o shutting down the spooler? Or I'd probably start a new thread on this one..

[Geoff Wild]

Well....reject will do just that - no one will be able to submit a job - but disable will allow jobs to be submitted and queued up - they just won't print.

Interesting concept on moving jobs without shutting down the spooler...I've always hated the fact that you have to shut the spooler down to move a job...

Rgds...Geoff

[Zinky]

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