spooled prints and printer power off

[Steve Riitano]

When sending a print using lp -d and the printer power is off, the print does not que up in the spooler. What can I do to change this behavior and have the print stay in the spool when the printer is off. (I have scripts that run under cron. Printers are sometimes left off accedently and I loose those prints)
steve.riitano@mt.ngb.army.mil

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

My experience is that the print requests will be queued up if the printer is down. Does your lpstat -t not show the queue?.

-Sri

[Jordan Bean]

If the printer is off and the jobs are still spooling, then I'm guessing the printer is attached to an external printer server which is still on.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Jordan is right. If the printer is a remote printer/print server, the requests will go to the remote system and wait there. If it is a network printer on the system, the queue will wait on the local system itself.

-Sri

[Frank Slootweg]

Like other have indicated, it depends a lot on which printer you use, how it is connected and which model script you use, so please give some details about that.

If it is a local printer, i.e. directly connected to your system, then please indicate the type of interface used, i.e. serial, parallel, etc..

If it is not a local printer, then please indicate if it is connected to a remote system (and give details about that system) or directly to a LAN (and indicate how it is connected to the LAN, i.e. JetDirect, lpd, etc..).

In case it is a local, serial connected, HP printer, see the printstat command in the lpfilter(1) manual page.

[Steve Riitano]

Sorry for not being specific. Here are more details: I have a unisys printer attached by a serial port using a printer model I copied from our old Sperry mainframes called ssp37. I also have a tally T6090 line printer attached directly on the same lan segment as the HP system. It is using the dumb printer model. After sending a lp -dlpa, the lpstat -t shows the print job in the que and then it leaves as if it printed. This is while the printers are off. Even when the printers are powered back on, that print sent while they were off does not print. Both printer types have the same problem and there are no other devices between the printer and HP K260 at all. The Tally printers have an internal lan card which is supplied by the same power as the printer itself. I added the Tally printer with "nicinst" provided by Tally. Added the Unisys lasers with SAM, Add Local Printer->Add Serial Printer. Thanks all for responding!
steve.riitano@mt.ngb.army.mil

[Frank Slootweg]

You will have to find some method to detect power-off programatically and put that into the model script.

Since the Unisys printer is not an HP printer it is unlikely that the printstat command which I mentioned works. However you could check the printer documentation to see if it is or can be made/set HP-compatible or/and try the printstat command.

As to the LAN-interfaced Tally printer, it is rather strange that that one does not properly handle power-off. I think you will have to contact Tally about that.

In any case, neither the HP-UX spooler (i.e. lpsched(1M)) nor the model scripts (especially the "dumb" model script you are using) have any provisions to handle power-off. They basically expect the devices or/and drivers to handle this.