Is a remote printer single threaded??

[Tim Medford]

I have a number of HP printers network connected to our production L class server running HPUX 11.0. I use JetAdmin to administer them.

If you print (lp) to any given printer, the jobs run through the print queue in the same sequence in which they were submitted. It's not possible for one print job to jump ahead of another, regardless of the size of the print job (as it should be).

I've recently added a remote printer. It's a Xerox docutech printer which is attached to a Sun Sparcstation. When printing to this remote printer, jobs no longer run through the queue sequentially. The printer tries to print the small jobs first regardless of what order they were sent in.

I suspect this can only be address on the Sun/Xerox side, but just wondered if there's anything I can do from the HP side to force the print order? I tried changing the "nowait" to "wait" for the rlpdaemon entry in inetd.conf, but it didn't help.

Any suggestions??

Thanks in advance,
Tim

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi Tim:

Print requests can be issued with a priority. The priority must range from 0-7 where zero is the lowest. The priority is used to select the next spooled file for the targeted printer or class of printers.

See the man pages for 'lp'.

...JRF...

[Tim Medford]

Thanks for the response James, but the issue is more complex than setting a priority.

There is a batch job which will generate hundreds, if not thousands of individual print files. They must print in the precise order in which they were sent to the printer. Unless there's an infinite number of priority settings, this won't help.

With a normal jet-direct attached printer, jobs print in the order they were generated, assuming priorities are all equal. I want the same behavior from this remote printer. The remote printer is out-smarting me by trying to sort the print jobs before it prints them.

I'm addressing the issue with Xerox.

Regards, Tim

[John Bolene]

The HP side is sending the printouts as it gets them to the remote Sun and printer.

It appears to this observer that the Sun print system or the printer is doing something with them.

Maybe the Sun has an option set to send the smallest prints out first to the printer.