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Old 08-28-2005, 12:42 AM   #1
aaron-aardvark
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Registered: Sep 2003
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Zombie Print Jobs


Here's the scenario:

I'm using CUPS.

I start a print job.

The printer jams and you have to shut it off to clear it.

Before I turn the printer on again you kill the active print job with lprm.

I turn the printer back on and it immediately starts printing garbage and spitting out paper.

Cycling the power to the printer doesn't help (you shut the printer off once already).

I can stop the printer by killing the parallel port process, but after that nothing will print. Rebooting doesn't help. The only way to get printing back is to remove the print queue and build a new one.

This seems like a major piece of dumbness in CUPS - or maybe I'm the dumb one. It seems to me that lprm should be able to kill the active print job, including getting rid of whatever is in the parallel port buffer.

By the way, a Google search on this subject found other reports of this problem but no acceptable solution. The closest anyone came was a Perl script that kills the parallel port process, but in my case that makes the queue permanently non-functional.

Am I missing something here, or what?

aa
 
Old 08-28-2005, 02:19 AM   #2
Charred
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Registered: Mar 2005
Location: Utah, USA
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Have you tried unplugging your printer and letting it sit for 15-20 minutes to allow the capacitors providing power to the data buffer to fully discharge? That usually works for me.

Edit:
It's the printer's internal data buffer that's the problem, not the spooling buffer in your box.

Last edited by Charred; 08-28-2005 at 02:20 AM.
 
Old 08-29-2005, 01:07 PM   #3
Tom Bozack
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Thanks for the suggestion. No, the printer memory isn't the problem, it's the parallel port buffer. That's demonstrated by the fact that killing the parallel port process immediately stops the printer.

aa
 
Old 08-29-2005, 03:36 PM   #4
Charred
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Hmmm. You're right, sorry. I thought I had already learned to read the whole thread before I reached a conclusion; apparently I hadn't. There SHOULD be some way of flushing the buffer without killing the whole process.

Last edited by Charred; 08-29-2005 at 03:38 PM.
 
Old 08-29-2005, 10:08 PM   #6
Tom Bozack
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Registered: Dec 2000
Location: Ridgecrest, California
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Yea, it seems like this should be totally transparent to the user. lprm should flush the buffer when it kills the active print job. As it is, it's a trap waiting to be sprung whenever the printer screws up during a print job.

Maybe I'm just missing something obvious, but this seems like one of those little things that really turns off people to Linux.

aa
 
  


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