Hello

I am am having a strange problem with CUPS and network printers.

I am running Red Hat Enterprise 3.0 ES, up-to-date KERNEL and up-to-date CUPS rpm.

My database is D3/PICK and network printers are supported via the LPD process. I am aware LPD has now gone from Enterprise, but CUPS has CUPS-LPD for backward compatability. Most of the time the printers work ok, but every now and then, random network printers will appear to stop printing, sometimes up to 15 minutes at a time. You can look at the GNOME PRINT MANAGER and it will show the jobs.

Anywhere between 5 and 25 minutes and the printer will continue printing jobs. It is not the printer becuase we have 40 network printers all assigned and random printers will go into this state.

To add to this environment, only those printers that are on REMOTE locations are the ones that appear to stall. We have 6 shops all connected via VPN / FRAME RELAY. The connections dont appear to drop because each SHOP has 6 PC's connecting via TELNET and these never drop.

I am wondering wheter CUPS is failing to connect to printers on a random basis, so when jobs are getting sent, it holds onto them. Only when it believes it can communicate with a printer does it send them again.

Any ideas or help would ber appreciated.

Here is a guide to checking the network printers, especially the remotes.

Thanks

Will check this out

I had the same problem. Read the following thread for my solution:

http://mialug.org/index.php?option=c...1347&catid=103

Hello

Thanks for all your replies. I now have some additional information to assist any user being able to point me in the right direction.

Thanks for the SCRIPT in this topic, but my printers NEVER stop they just seem to hesitate for a while. When my print jobs seem to stop, if I look on the PRINTERS, they still say they are "active, accepting jobs". They never say "stopped"

On a day to day basis all 45 network printers will print instantaneously as soon as a JOB has been sent. Then, on the ODD occasion a JOB will be sent, but the printer will not output it. The DATA lights are not on, so the JOB is still residing on the Red Hat Enterprise server and not simply stuck in the Printer itself.

The job will eventually come out, with all other jobs that may have accumulated behind it. This delay could be 5 minutes, it could be 30 minutes. totally random. When the printer seems to become active all jobs print as if there was nothing wrong in the first place.

I put the CUPS system into DEBUG mode this morning, and the ONLY error I can see in there (when one of the printers appeared to have hesitated) is the following

[Job 16405] Remote Host did not respond with a command status byte after 300 seconds!!

Can someone explain what this means, and how I overcome it.

Thanks

John