Telnet printer connected via ISDN

[Piet Timmers]

Hi,

We have telnet printers connected via ISDN, and we only use (and pay) the line when we need it. There are two problems:

1. A printer gets stalled (mostly run out of paper), connection to the printer stays, so we have to pay a lot for nothing,
2. A print job is busy, but sometimes (for us to often) the jobs stays busy, and no paper is beeing printed. There is an active connection, so we have to pay for the ISDN line.

We try to avoid these situations, but sometimes we see printjobs over 2 days busy, doing nothing, so they cost a lot.

Is there a way (simple) to solve this, or to make it less expensive.

Greetings,

Piet Timmers

[Lokesh_2]

Hi Piet,

A simple workaround I can think of at the moment. Keep your queueu is STOPPED state. Then make a command procedure something like the following ( not tested !! ):

******my_print.com**********
$start/queue
$print/notify 'p1' /que=
$wait 00:05:00 !how log you expect to finish the print job, I assume 5 minutes.
$stop/reset !stop the queue if job do not finish in 5 minutes
$exit

Then whenever you want to print any file, just give following command:

$@my_print

Above I am assuming that your job will finish in 5 minutes. You can modify the above command procedure at your will and add some more feature and error handling to it.

HTH,
Thanks & regards,
Lokesh Jain

[labadie_1]

Lokesh, instead of the wait ..., I think a
$ synchron/entry='$entry

will do the job fine.

:-)

Gerard

[Jan van den Ende]

Gerard:

NO. SYNC will NOT help you.
If the printer is stalled, your job won't finish, and you will never get SYNCed!!

Lokesh:
Maybe a little more 'common sence' might get built in:
After 5 minutes if the job is "printing" give it 5 more, if it is "stalled", you might as well stop (and trigger some action maybe?)

Piet:
try to inventorize all "really busy, gimme some more time" statusses, and also all "this cannot not be what we want" statusses.
I bet from there you still know how to finish your print procedure.

All this ASSUMES that you ARE printing from DCL!

If you are somehow (also) generating print jobs from within an application, you probably will need a kind of supervising job.
If that is the case, contact me directly:
jpe aapje vdende punt demon punt nl
We do have something somewhat similar that might be adapted.

cu,

jpe

[Antoniov.]

Hello Piet,
you haven't explain us how work your IDSN; I suppose you have an ISDN router in your network and when you printer job start, router automatically begin connection and stay active until time-out without data transmission is reached.
If environment is this, are you sure the printer queue keep alive connection? How long is time-out on router?
I'm not sure your trouble is printer queue (if you use router otherwise post your ISDN congiguratione and devices).

@Antoniov

[Matt West]

Piet

Just one observation. Does you ISDN link have a rental charged against it, only in the UK this charge is quite high. It may be benificial to investigate an ADSL link which can remain active at no extra cost. You would have to establish the initial VPN but this may well prove to be a better option.

Regards

Matt