printer

[khilari]

Hi guys, there is a printer which stops printing all of a sudden, it is a network printer... It gets disabled all of a sudden when large print jobs comes its way... Talking 5000 printouts..... What do we do to stop this printer from disbling on its own when large print queus come its way...
Thanks

[Chris Vail]

A printer becoming disabled in long print jobs is actually normal behavior. When its buffer fills up, it will send a message to the sending host not to send any more data. When the buffer empties, or nearly empties, it should send a message announcing that it is ready to accept more data and/or other print jobs.

Technically, the printer is not 'disabled' but is merely overloaded. When its buffer is clear, it should start printing again. If it doesn't, then you have some problems to deal with.

You didn't mention make/model nor the method of 'net connection. But from your description, I would say that your printer is behaving normally.

Chris

[Dennis Handly]

>It gets disabled all of a sudden

The real question is what do you mean by disabled?
What does "lpstat printer" show?

[Bill Hassell]

> it is a network printer...

That narrows it down...

So is it an HP printer with an HP JetDirect card configured with hppi, sam or addqueue? Or is it something else? Is it a network printer but you use a print server such as Linux or Windows to talk to the network printer?

If the printer uses a JetDirect LAN card, you can gather stats from the card with the command:

hpnpadmin -v 12.34.56.78

The printer isn't getting disabled due to the large job, it is failing due to networking problems. To find the problem, you'll need to trace the print job (megs to gigs of logfile entries) or trace the last 500 LAN packets for the printer's IP using Wireshark or similar.