failed printer not disabled when printing to class

Bennett a42n8k9 at dejazzd.com
Fri Nov 25 06:50:30 PST 2005


Thank you very much for taking the time to clarify these couple of things for me.  It sounds like 1.2 will have the backend functionality to disable to queue (if we so desire from the backend script).

This all started with our need to disable the round-robin printing to class printers.  The reason is that we send the jobs to an external LaPres server for formatting.  Unfortunately our sales application will turn each manifest in a shipping route into its own job.  If these get sent to the two LaPres servers in round-robin fashion then we get stops printed out in the wrong order.  (only because one server may finish before the other)

I was toying with adding a "RoundRobin = No" flag in the classes.conf file which would disable the round-robin printing to class printers.  It was then that I discovered that it kept trying the #1 queue and never tried the #2 queue.  In this case (and probably this case only) it would require manual intervension to bring the LaPres server back online and would also be benificial to be able to disable the queue so the job would go to the next queue in the class.

I'll wait for 1.2 to be complete, however...  if the RoundRobin=Yes/No is something that might be beneficial for others, I would be happy to send in a diff.  (it was a pretty basic change to turn round-robin on and off with a config option)

Again, thank you for taking the time to clarify some of these things for me.

- Bennett
>
> There are very few failure modes that justify stopping the queue
> without a retry.  The CUPS 1.1 backend interface doesn't offer a
> way to differentiate between different kinds of failures - you
> only get success (exit status 0) or failure (exit status 1).
>
> CUPS 1.2 adds several new exit codes to allow backends to tell the
> scheduler what to do.  The CUPS_BACKEND_STOP exit code (defined in
> <cups/backend.h> as the value 4) can be used for this purpose, even
> with classes, to force the print queue to be stopped.  The standard
> CUPS backends only use this exit code for absolutely fatal conditions
> such as bad URIs and other errors that require the administrator/user
> to manually fix the problem.
>
> --
> ______________________________________________________________________
> Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
> Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com





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