Printing from AIX causes printer to go down

volfan · 12-15-2004, 01:57 PM

I am just a user, not a programmer and am trying to pinpoint a problem with our printer. We run AIX version 5 with an emulator package. We are printing to an Epson 8500 across a LAN. Lately, everything we send from AIX to the printer takes the printer down. We can print directly from Excel, Word, etc but if it comes from AIX it takes the printer down. Also, we can print from AIX to other printers on the network without problems.

Has anybody else experienced this and if so, what can we do about it?

iainr · 12-16-2004, 09:33 AM

Hi volfan,

Can I confirm exactly what you mean by "takes the printer down"? Do you mean the printer itself (the physical object) has a problem (and, if so, what is the problem)? Or is it the print queue that goes down, and if so where?

Thanks.

volfan · 12-16-2004, 09:39 AM

The print queue goes from Ready to Down. The user will get a message on their screen that the printer has gone down. I sign on as root and when I do an lpstat it shows the printer status as down. I have to cancel the print job and change the status on the printer back to Ready.

zorba4 · 12-16-2004, 10:56 AM

Is it a freshly installed printer, or is it a new problem on a printer which previously worked prefctly with AIX since many years ?

volfan · 12-16-2004, 11:45 AM

New problem on a printer which has worked with AIX for the last three years.

zorba4 · 12-17-2004, 02:14 PM

I would suggest make a system backup (just in case) then drop the print queue and re-create the print queue exactly the same way.
By the way, did you check the standard things (maximum number or processes, lsps to see if the swap is full, reboot and look if vmstat shows to many pageing ins at the moment where the print daemons die, etc...)

volfan · 12-20-2004, 01:37 PM

We tried but still no luck. We did find out that the same brand/type printer at another location is doing the same thing. We just recently upgraded our frame relay and perhaps the two are related. We will research that possibility next. Thanks!

iainr · 12-21-2004, 06:14 AM

AIX has a very annoying feature where if it can't communicate with the remote printer/print server it takes the queue down, but doesn't bother to bring it up when it can communicate with it again, so the network might well be the issue.

If that is the problem, I think there's reasonably cheap software you can get to work round it, or you could just script something (check if print queue is down, try to bring it up, email administrator if it is still down).