Printer Not Accepting Requests

[Paddy O'Connell]

Hi,

Can i ask a question about a printer status changing from yes to no for accepting requests.

Does anyone know of a reason why it would change, there is 3 Unix admins including myself and none of us changed this. I've re-enabled it and it's back printing fine, but i noticed about 10 jobs its queue.

Can the amount of jobs cause this to switch automatically? is there any logs on the server i can check?

Thanks
PAddy

[Paddy O'Connell]

Sorry just to add it's a HP-UX 11.0 box.

[Jeff_Traigle]

Not sure I understand exactly. First you say it wasn't accepting jobs, but then you say you re-enabled it. These are two separate items with the print spooler. Assuming you meant it was disabled and that you enabled it with the enable command, most likely the printer was offline for some reason... someone turned it off overnight, paper jam, etc. The spooler will disable a queue and not enable it when the printer comes back online that way.

[MarkSyder]

Local printer or remote? If remote, is it also connected to a Windoze system? If so, can you print to it from Windoze?

How about pinging the printer (if it's remote)?

Mark Syder (like the drink but spelt different)

[Paddy O'Connell]

Sorry Guys, not making myself clear.

User was complaining it was not printing, when i checked it, it was enabled but it was not accepting requests. I selected the printer and set it to accept requests and all was well.
I did actually ping the printer at the time form the server and it was replying.

The printer is a remote printer.

My question is can this happen automatically, like triggered but too many jobs or the printer being down or would someone have had to set the accept requests to no

[Geoff Wild · Accepted solution]

Yes - it can be triggered by outside influences - IE - say the printer is out of paper for a long time or just powered off - I've seen queues go disabled for that.

Rgds...Geoff

[Bill Hassell]

Be careful about the terminology. accept/reject are specific lp commands that stop spooling for a specific printer. If a printer is "rejected" or not accepting print requests, the lp command will immediately fail. Nothing will be put into the queue. The only way to cause this condition is the reject command (lp or root user only). lpstat will report the queue as rejecting all print requests.

However, if the printer is disabled, the lp command will still work and more print jobs go into the queue. Any user can disable a printer using the disable command, and anytime the printer script returns a non-zero error code, the print queue is disabled. Remote printersHP-UX and are extremely dumb and there's not much checking done with the remote server. When the printer is disabled by printer script, the "reason code" will be the number returned by the script. Most of the time, this is a 1 indicating some command inside the script exited with that number.

[Raj D.]

Hi Paddy,

1. Try doing disable and enable the printer.And check what happens.

2. ping the IP of the printer and see if its reachable.

3. check the queue :
# lpstat -t | grep -i PRT_NAME

4. few pending job might have stucked the queue.
Cancel all the pending jobs , and check:
# cancel request_no

5. Check the log files since when it last printed and , whats wrong:
# cat /var/adm/lp/log | grep -i PRT_NAME | head -n 5

6. # do a quick lpshut and lpsched .

Hope this will help you,
Cheers,

Raj.