Followup On Printer Problem.

[Nobody's Hero]

Ok, Someone asked me to let you know how my printer problem was resolved.

Background: HP 9000 LaserJet printer set up as a remote printer was in a 'disabled' state every morning. All other 250 printers were fine.

Cleaning lady was not unplugging it.
Router and switch info was clean.
Tried deleting and readding it as remote.
telneted into JD card and set options to = others of same type.
Finally I called HP and they sked me to delete the printer and add it as a network printer and see if it is up and running in the morning.
Here is my response to HP.


Hello HP.

Ok, here is the story. Yesterday, I deleted my printer and added it back into UNIX as a network printer. I did this as a test so I would not disturb the troubled printer in question. I deleted it with no problem. I added it back in as a network printer, via ???sam???. Sam invoked the jetadmin utility to add a network printer. I went through the normal steps to add a network printer. I received a ???memory error??? ???not enough memory??? while adding, however, the printer was added Ok. I tested some prints from Unix and the Lan and everything was working fine. So, at this point I was planning on doing these same steps for the troubled HP LaserJet 9000 printer, after hours. Then I proceeded to get many error messages at the systems prompt. The Nclass with 32GB of memory was short on resources causing the machine to become very sluggish and users started to call about performance. Then I noticed that the hpnpd daemon was started and it spawned about 700 ???1000 child processes called hpnpadmin_drf or something like that. I wrote a script to kill these processes to relieve contention and I noticed as I killed the processes, more were started. This was out of control, I killed hpnpd but the processes continued to climb to the point that I had to re-boot our production payroll server to resolve the problem. People were not very happy and at this point I explained that there is no such thing as 100% availability, ha ha. So I rebooted the box, removed the hpnpd script from /sbin/init.d. Just for kicks, I deleted the troubled 9000 printer and added it back in as a ???remote??? printer. I was flirting with disaster at this point.
The good news,
The HP9000 printer was up and running this morning when I cam in at 7, before the users. They said it was working fine and the printer was not reset at all. Go figure! I have no idea, I???ll wait and see if the printer is online and working tomorrow morning.

In the mean time, I guess I need to look into why jetadmin went into a panic. We might need a patch or an upgrade version of jetadmin. I???ll look into this today.

Thanks for your help Robert.
Bob Menefee



Thanks,
Everyone.