Printer Queues get automatic disabled

[Peter Reuschlein]

Hello together,

currently we figured out a strange problem on one of our servers.
We have lots of printers added to the system (hpux11.i), but in some strange ways diffrent printers disable themselfs. Its working when we enable them again with lpstat, but we cannot figure out why they are suddenly disabled.
Is there any logfile we can have a look at?
/var/adm/syslog and /var/adm/lp/log nothing in there.

Thanks so far
Peter

[RAC_1]

How are these printers configured?? Network/Remote?? Start scheduler with -v option and check log files. They should give some information to start the troubleshooting.

lpsched -v

Also, if these are network/Jetdirect printers, check with hpnpadmin -v "print_queue" You can also do some debugging with hpnpf command.

[Steve Steel]

Hi


lpsched -v is the best advise but

lpstat -t

shows a lot of info for a downed printer

If they are remote or on a slow network they have timed out


In hppi you can up the timeout

Steve STeel

[Alzhy · Accepted solution]

Peter,

Peace & Clean Air.

We also have thousands of printers and it is fairly common to have printers go into a disabled state for which the cure is simply to enable it.

The reason (and I am theorizing) is because the way the printers were set up. If they were set up as simple remote printers (as we've done) - which means we treat its printer as its own print server - then it is more suceptible to getting disabled. And the reasons mostly have been due to printers going into power saver mode, offlined, network disconnect, maintenance/kits replacement, etc.

The cure wil be to convert your printers to be network printers and use their own network drivers (i.e. JetDirect) so UNIX spooler/OS has full communications with the printer. When I ocnverted my HP printers (JetDirect) to network printers from Remote via Jetdirect software -- all of the occasaional disablement of those HP printers were gone.

In the meantime, the fix is to simply do periodic "enable" of each defined printers. With thousnads of printers - that may be a tall order specially if some are disconnected/down,etc... However there is a fix -- in this forum someone posted a replacemnent rlpstat command that will make your lpstat command faster...

HTH