Remote printers disable their queue periodically

[Mark Coleman_1]

Hi,
We have all of our printers from the HP setup as remote printers. These remote printers are either printers attached to Windows workstations or they are on network attached print servers. If someone turns their desktop off over the weekend and then comes in on Monday, those print queues on the HP will be in a "disable" state and they have to be reenabled. Is there any way to tell the lp subsystem to not disable the remote print queues, or maybe a script that could be run frequently to reenable those queues?

Thanks,
Mark

[Christian Tremblay]

I don't think you can disable that "feature"
unless it changed in the newer versions of the OS.I remember writing such a script years ago for 10.20 and running it in cron every 15 minutes.

Chris

[Bill Hassell]

This is one of the reasons that using 'remote' printers is discouraged. The protocol is archaic and provides no status about the printers. The only way to solve this for all users (Windows/Macs/HP-UX) is to use the HP LAN card or external LAN adapter. Not only does the need for a print server disappear, but each user talks directly to the printer and the LAN card will disconnect dead connections from the PC automatically. The other advantage for HP network adpaters is that HP-UX will now have dozens of options for print control such as landscape, double sided, output tray choices, font spacing, etc.

Otherwise, just create a script to find all the diabled printers and renable them. Then run the script every few minutes in cron.