Switch OFF printer 'stop' feature?

[Peets]

On reflection, the majority (read: +90%) of the problems I have had with CUPS is a fully randomised desire to go into 'stop printer' mode.  There is rhyme nor reason to it, and it's not a feature that will be of great value in SME and end user configurations.  It may be different in Gnome, but in KDE KPrinter will not even provide access to that facility (as it needs root level access), so an end user is stuck as the localhost:631 port needs user authentication to set up before it works, and giving end users access to root level just to fix a recurring printer problem strikes me relatively insane as well - it would be nice if it didn't happen in teh first place.

Or, put another way, this problem is, in my experience, contributor #1 to users eventually giving up on the Linux desktop.

I would very seriously welcome a switch that will permanently disable this 'feature' so that those of us who try to get people away from spyware infested environments can actually have confidence we don't lead them into another set of problems.  As a matter of fact, the random stops are not of much help in a production server either..

Until such time as a switch becomes available, I guess we're stuck with glorious workarounds like hammering the printer into 'enable' mode every five minutes: witness the kind of scripts as below:

==============
#!/bin/sh

COUNTER=0

while [ $COUNTER -lt 1 ]; do
DATE=$(date +%Y-%m-%d-%T)
PRINTERSTOPPED=$(lpstat -p | grep disabled | awk '{print $2}')
MESSAGE=$(echo "Printer $PRINTERSTOPPED was stopped! $DATE")

if [ -n "$PRINTERSTOPPED" ]; then
lpstat -p | grep disabled | /usr/bin/enable $(awk '{print $2}')
echo $MESSAGE | mail -s "$MESSAGE" webmaster at example.com
fi

sleep 300
done
================

(source: http://tinyurl.com/88efv - www.mailug.org)

Rather insane as a solution, but it indicates a kind of desparation.

*NOT* good.

= P =