HPUX 10.20

[newby]

I've recently had to remove a heap of printers from the system and re-create a new range of printers which can be used by the end-user.

(that was the easy part).

the problem is that as soon as I created
a new printer on the system, the default printer name on the Unix host were lost. (ie: no more default printer existed....

I've set up the default printer again for all 20 hosts, but I'm wondering if anyone else has come across this problem and is it a normal to expect a default printer config to disappear each time I need to create a new queue.

NB: Not using Jetadmin or SAM to create these. I'm creating them using a script to create the lp queue, etc and the print jobs are sent to an NT Server which handles the actual print requests.

[Juergen Nagel]

Hi,
Please, send me the script.
j.nagel@planorg-jena.de

[Cheryl Griffin]

Sounds like there is a problem with your script. Potentially it is corrupting the printer files that keep track of the printers on your system and their configuration.

Specifically I am refering to data files such as pstatus and qstatus.

What does your script do, exactly?

[newby]

Cheryl,

Basically all the script does is to ask for the local printer queue name, remote printer
queue and Server name then it creates the queue, uses the lp stop command, creates the printer queue and restarts the lp scheduler..

I have attached the file in case it can help explain why the default printer keeps dropping out, after adding a new printer into the system.

[Bill Hassell]

Just an aside, but how do you get everyone to agree on where the default printer is located? Today, most multiuser systems never declare a default printer because it gets piles of lost printouts. Some users will print the same job 5-10 times before they realize what printer they are using.

A good alternative is to never declare a default printer which forces the user to either use lp -d or (much better) use the environment variable LPDEST. Since every user can set this in .profile or even change it during a session, LPDEST works very well in programs where selecting a printer is not possible.

[newby]

FYI - I use "lp -d" to setup the default printer normally for each of the hp servers.

The HP workstation users will be configured to a particular printer (which they are informed has been configured). The applications group determine which host is to be used.

I'm aware of the LPDEST option that can be used
but with approx 200 odd users, for each application, I believe thats' a lot of
wasted time just to configure a default printer, (as most of our users don't move around work location), so its faster just to have it set with the lp -d on a server by server basis. Most Servers are dedicated to run about 2 apps anywway. If we end up merging more apps/system then I agree that LPDEST would be a better way to configure user print queues.

[Juergen Nagel]

Hi,
I can not find a error in your script. On my server it works faultless. I can not reptile the error.

e little improvment

SCHED=`ps -ef | grep lpsched | wc -l`

better

SCHED=`ps -ef | grep lpsched | grep -v grep | wc -l`

[newby]

Thanks all of you who have looked into my problem. I appreciate your efforts with this.

I'm going to live with the problem for the next few months and investigate thoroughly later on.

[Rick Garland]

The lp -d does not set a system default printer. The lpadmin -d command does.