I have a problem with cups dropping print jobs. The machine fedora 13 installation using cups 1.4.4-10

The dropped jobs happen only rarely happen and therefore is difficult to debug the problem since it doesn't happen 99% of the time. This morning (while in the shower) I wondered if the lost jobs are lost because they are timing out, perhaps because of slow input from a user. I can test this more later in the week..

The print jobs are initiated from within a COBOL program. COBOL opens the print file as output and at this stage a job appears in the print queue with a status in the print queue of "held".

The user types in various bits of information and when complete the program executes the final write to the output print file. The job is somehow released and then is physically printed by CUPS. I suspect that if the user is slow the "held" job times out and then the job is lost.

There are a number of timeout directives in cups.conf but I am unsure which might be appropriate in this case. Or perhaps there is some other timeout thing happening.

Can anyone suggest which directive I might be needing or does someone have another idea about what might be causing lost jobs?

For starters, I dont smell lost jobs, but rarther crashed jobs...think about it. The link COBOL-CUPS could be an unstable marriage, what is the communication protocol? If memory serves, it could be length delimited. Any deviation could spell disaster and one more lost job...

I'd try to find out if jobs crash, rarther than find out why they are lost, CUPS has yet to "loose " a print job on my network...

...that is then staged to be picked up by the print mechanism...an iffy combo, if you ask me. The user does not initiate the printing, but I think the printing is started up by the print logic...so, what's the trigger here?

Just rambling out loud...but the shower is not the only place where thoughts bubble up

Good luck

Thor

Usually a program opens a file writes to the file, closes it and then afterwards it is printed.
Some languages like COBOL FORTRAN open a print file.
Cups shows this in its job list with a status of "held".
The print file has stuff written to it and then it is closed. At this point cups sends the job to the printer.
If the job is not completed within a certain time cups cancels the job.

In my case if there was delay completing input from an operator the job disappeared.
The way I chose to keep the job active was to insert a directive
in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf of
Timeout 10800
Which would cancel a job after 3 hours but the problem is now effectively fixed.

Glad to read this!

Thor