Cups printers getting disabled. Why?

blizunt7 · 12-27-2007, 02:14 PM

Hey all,
I have a new server (Poweredge 2950 Xeon 5148) with about 100 clients on it, who are printing constantly to socket and lpd printers (128 printers to be exact). We have cups running from the following RPM:

Code:

# rpm -qa | grep -i cups
cups-libs-1.1.22-0.rc1.9.20.2.el4_5.2
cups-1.1.22-0.rc1.9.20.2.el4_5.2
hal-cups-utils-0.5.2-8.2
libgnomecups-0.1.12-5

For some reason, after a minute or 2 (what seems at random), printers are disabling themselves. WE have no idea why. Our cupsd.conf is the same from all our other systems, and they all print just fine. We had to create a script to enable the printers and we run it every minute (not my own handywork)

Code:

DISABLED=`lpstat -t | grep dis | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'`
while [ $DISABLED != "" ]
do
        /usr/sbin/lpadmin -p $DISABLED -E
        DISABLED=`lpstat -t | grep dis | head -1 | awk '{print $2}'`
done

I have enabled "debug" logging, but im not even sure what to look for.
can anyone help me in the right direction to better trouble shoot this. Thanks soo much!

jailbait · 12-27-2007, 02:18 PM

On my system I have two cups log files:

/var/log/cups/access_log
/var/log/cups/error_log

You might check these logs if you have them on your system.

----------------------
Steve Stites

blizunt7 · 12-27-2007, 02:34 PM

Yes, i do have these log files, and i have enabled them to "debug" level (which logs almost everything).

I ran a "tail -f" of the error log, and its a lot of stuff, but nothing looks like errors.

jailbait · 12-27-2007, 06:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blizunt7

Yes, i do have these log files, and i have enabled them to "debug" level (which logs almost everything).

I ran a "tail -f" of the error log, and its a lot of stuff, but nothing looks like errors.

Take a look in /var/spool/cups. Sometimes when you have printer errors you get unprinted jobs stuck in the spool. Delete all of the jobs in the cups spool and you may get rid of the one which cups is unable to handle for whatever reason. I have cleared printer jams this way a couple of times.

----------------------
Steve Stites

allend · 12-27-2007, 08:04 PM

Perhaps you need to increase the Max_Clients in cupsd.conf?

blizunt7 · 12-28-2007, 10:49 AM

Max clients is at default (100), i have over 100 printers. However my other systems also have over 100 prints, with cups.conf max clients set at 100.
(clients = printers .. i assume)??

jailbait -- /var/spool/cups -- If a print job prints, is it kept in spool/cups?? or does it get cleared.
Currently i have 1018 line items in /var/spool/cups

jailbait · 12-28-2007, 03:35 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by blizunt7

Max clients is at default (100), i have over 100 printers. However my other systems also have over 100 prints, with cups.conf max clients set at 100.
(clients = printers .. i assume)??

jailbait -- /var/spool/cups -- If a print job prints, is it kept in spool/cups?? or does it get cleared.
Currently i have 1018 line items in /var/spool/cups

Yes, it is kept in /var/spool/cups. I wrote a script to clean the garbage out of my system once a week. One thing the cleanup script does is clear /var/spool/cups.

-------------------------
Steve Stites