Printer queue

[Glenn Bohrman]

I had a printer that was turned off when somebody went to print. When they sent the print job, looks like it went but nothing ever came out of the printer even after turning on the printer. There is nothing listed in the printer queue and now that it is back on it is working fine?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Glenn,

Looks like the print spool is not aware when the printer is offline. It seeems it merrily sent the bits and bytes out without regard for there actually being a working printer.

What is supposed to happen is the output is supposed to spool.

What kind of printer and how was the hp printer spool set up. Standard lp, an addin product?

SEP

[Andy Torres]

That doesn't sound consistent with lp scheduler activity. Jobs don't disappear from the spooler unless they are passed or removed.

Try to duplicate the failure. To test, power off the printer and disable the queue. Then print again the same way from within the application. The job should then show up in the disabled queue, waiting to print.

If it isn't there, the job may be directed somewhere else or otherwise lost in programmatical failure. The program that submitted the job would need to be debugged in that case. Also, make sure the queue is set to "accept".

If it IS there, power up the printer, wait for its self-tests to complete, then enable the queue. The job should then print. If it doesn't, take a look at the queue configuration for correct destination settings.

[Rodney Hills]

You didn't mention how the printer is accessed.

Parallel port on your HP box?
Printer on another remote computer?
JetDirect connection?
Printer on outbound DTC port?

Each printer connection type has its own method of diagnosing.

-- Rod Hills

[Bill Hassell]

As Rodney mentioned, there are many different ways to connect to a printer and the least reliable is through a print server (a printer connected to some other box, perhaps running Windows). The remote printer protocol (RFC 1170) is very dated and has little in the area of data integrity and status. JetDirect (HP printer LAN cards) and directly connected parallel printers are more robust in handling power off situations. The DTC (using serial connections to printers) can easily lose data if a simple xon/xoff protocol is used.

[Mohd Ramadzan Bin Dimya]

For HPUX,

check scheduler first (running or not )
#lpstat -t
if not, start the scheduler first
#lpsched

enable the queue
#enable (printer name)

accept the queue
#accept (printer name)

thanks