Jetadmin - hpnpf: unknown host pftkittinglsr

[Verónica Muñoz Segovia]

I have some jetadmin and suddenly the printers were disable, when I cheked the printer log a found several messages as follow:

hpnpf: unknown host printer1
hpnpf: unknown host printer2

What that error means?

Thanks.

[Michael Tully]

Check your DNS/host file for the entries. If you cannot resolve manually, jetadmin won't be able to do it either.

# nslookup printer1
# nslookup printer2

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Do a ping pftkittinglsr. When you can get that to work by correcting an entry in /etc/hosts, or on your DNS server, or in your NIS/NIS+ host maps then your problem should be resolved. Did you make a change to /etc/reslv.conf, /etc/hosts, or /etc/nsswitch.conf recently? Did your network guys "improve" their DNS tables recently. This is a classic hostname resolution problem.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Thde printers were originally added as hostnames rather than IP addresses. Therefore, your DNS server has lost the information. Just type:

nslookup printer1

It should fail so call your DNS administrator and get the hostnames added back. If that is not possible, change /etc/nsswitch.conf to look at /etc/hosts first (and put the printer hostnames there), or just delete the printer and add it back using the IP address and not the hostname. You can use removequeue and addqueue to simplify the task. These commands are found in /opt/hpnpl/bin (or if you are using the obsolete/unsupported the directory is /opt/hpnp/bin),

[Verónica Muñoz Segovia]

This happended just for a while, like 5 minutes, and after that everything was ok, How can I check If I loose conectivity from a while, is there any log or command that can help me?

Vero.

[Bill Hassell]

The command is nslookup as in:

nslookup pftkittinglsr

However, if you have a loose network cable, there will be a lot more problems than printing. It could be that the loose cable is at the DNS server or worse, someone is playing around with your network cables without notifying the system administrators.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

In addition to cabling, someone may have rebooted the DNS server. That points to another potential problem. You need to have at least one secondary DNS (with an extra entry in your /etc/resolv.conf file) server so that if the primary is down for whatever reason, the system can still do hostname lookups after timing out on the primary.