Summary: Printer Problem on Solaris 10

Dear managers,

thanks to

"Tobias Nutt" <tobias.nutt@sar.de>
Andrew Watkins <andrew@dcs.bbk.ac.uk>

and especially to

Brad Morrison <MorrisonB@calpine.com>
"Abdul Nazer T.K." <anazer@aljomaih.com.sa>

I had a bunch of problems with lp and found a bunch of ways to work 
around them (some of them). First it is a very good idea to do

	lpadmin -p Einkauf -F wait

where Einkauf is my print queue in order to prevent resends of a print 
job if lp things the job failed, otherwise your printer might consume a 
small forrest when you just wanted to print a single page and lp for 
whatever reason thinks, that the print job failed. And lp thinks that 
very often. I could hardy reproduce this problem in our dev office but 
every 5 minutes at a production site. Someone mentioned the term "TCP 
storm" as a reason for this problem. No idea what this is, but it leads 
to messages like

Subject: Problem with printer Einkauf
The printer Einkauf has stopped printing for the reason given below.
Fix the problem and bring the printer back on line.
Printing has stopped, but will be restarted in a few minutes;
issue an enable command if you want to restart sooner.
Unless someone issues a change request
          lp -i Einkauf-145 -P ...
to change the page list to print, the current request will be reprinted
from
the beginning.
The reason(s) it stopped (multiple reasons indicate repeated attempts):
exec exit fault<EOT>

and occurs very often under certain circumstances (production site). 
Very annoying! The queue gets disabled and needs a manual reenable only 
to get down a few minutes later again. I found that lp can be 
reactivated with the following sequence of commands.

	/usr/bin/disable Einkauf

	lpshut
	pkill lpsched
	rm -r /var/spool/lp/tmp /var/spool/lp/temp /var/spool/lp/requests
	/usr/lib/lpsched

	/usr/bin/enable Einkauf

But I didn't want to do that every 5 minutes so I looked for another 
solution. Someone recommended to use cups instead of lp. Since I never 
figured out how to do things like "Take paper from tray 2", "Print only 
the pages 3-4", "Print 2 sheets per page",... with lp, I finally got 
cups from the Solaris companion DVD and worked through the cups 
documentation. It took me a while, but was worth the effort. Cups is 
running now, has no problems with the print jobs issued at the 
mentioned production site and supports all the above mentioned features.

I really recommend CUPs as a drop-in replacement for lp. A very neat 
site-effect is that you can just do

	lp Test.pdf

and cups will take care of the conversion from pdf to Postscript or 
PCL. Very neat!

Thanks,

   Andreas


>> we have configured the following printer (lpstat -p -l):
>>
>> printer Einkauf waiting for auto-retry. available.
>>          exec exit fault
>>          Form mounted:
>>          Content types: postscript
>>          Printer types: PS
>>          Description:
>>          Connection: direct
>>          Interface: /usr/lib/lp/model/netstandard_foomatic
>>          PPD: none
>>          On fault: write to root once
>>          After fault: continue
>>          Users allowed:
>>                  (all)
>>          Forms allowed:
>>                  (none)
>>          Banner page never printed
>>          Character sets:
>>
>>          Default pitch:
>>          Default page size: 80 wide 66 long
>>          Default port settings:
>>          Options: media=A4, protocol=bsd, dest=10.36.49.21
>>
>> We are now getting the following message every minute.
>>
>> Message from lp on sun (???) [ Fri Jan 12 13:16:37 ] ...
>> Subject: Problem with printer Einkauf
>> The printer Einkauf has stopped printing for the reason given below.
>> Fix the problem and bring the printer back on line.
>> Printing has stopped, but will be restarted in a few minutes;
>> issue an enable command if you want to restart sooner.
>> Unless someone issues a change request
>>          lp -i Einkauf-145 -P ...
>> to change the page list to print, the current request will be 
>> reprinted
>> from
>> the beginning.
>> The reason(s) it stopped (multiple reasons indicate repeated 
>> attempts):
>> exec exit fault<EOT>
>>
>> I cannot check the print queue
>>
>> /usr/ucb/lpq -P Einkauf
>> could not talk to print service at sun
>>
>> Killing lpsched did not help:
>>
>> 	pkill lpsched
>> 	/usr/lib/lp/local/lpsched
>>
>> Trying to remove jobs did not work either. :-(
>>
>> /usr/ucb/lprm -P Einkauf -
>> could not talk to print service at sun
>>
>> Any idea how I can fix this?
> Maybe: (from a call from our customer)
>
>
> In Infodoc 21593 ist ein Script enthalten (Netstandard_install),
> mit dem man einfach netstandard-Drucker anlegen kann.
>    "usage $0 localqueuename printerhostname [remotequeuename]"
> http://sunsolve.sun.com/search/document.do?assetkey=1-9-21593-1
>
>
> WICHTIG: vor der Umstellung bitte den letzten lp-Patch installieren.
>
>
> Fuer PostScript Drucker bitte auch folgende Zeilen entkommentieren:
> #  if printer is a POSTSCRIPT-Printer you might set
> the following two lines
> #lpadmin -p ${LOCALQUEUENAME} -T PS       #  (set to the type of 
> printer
> you have )
> #lpadmin -p ${LOCALQUEUENAME} -I postscript #(set to the filecontents 
> your
> printer
> can serve )
>
>
> Bei Treppenstufen fuer Nicht-PostScript Ausdrucke wird unix2dos(1) in 
> das
> interfacescript
> eingebaut:
>          case "$TERM" in
> .....
>                  * )
>                          # We don't know the type, so just assume that 
> the
>                          # input and output are the same. Use netpr.
>                          #FILTER=/bin/cat
>                          FILTER=/usr/bin/unix2dos
> .....
> File /etc/lp/interfaces/QNAME #fuer einen netstandard-Drucker
> oder in die Kopiervorlage fuer neu angelegte netstandard-Drucker:
> /usr/lib/lp/model/netstandard
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