[cups.general] Re: printer stoppages

[Jerome Alet]

On Thu, Aug 12, 2004 at 01:08:58PM +0200, Helge Blischke wrote:
> Mark Brophy wrote:
> > 
> > Hi:
> > We're having problems here with CUPS frequently stopping printers.  After the printer is stopped, jobs fill up in the queue and eventually have to be removed when we restart the printer.  The thing is, I don't want the printer to stop in the first place.  I saw that more than a few people have a shell script as a cronjob that restarts all stopped printers, but this is not a reasonable solution for us.  It seems that when the printers go to sleep, the problems begin.  So my questions are
> > 1) What's the purpose/benefit of this behavior?
> > 2) How can I disable it?
> > 
> > The printers in question are all HP LaserJets by brand: 
> 4200,4500,etc, and I have a custom backend written, heavily based on 
> PyKota.  It's to my understanding that if this returns a nonzero 
> result, then the printer will also be stopped.  If anyone could 
> offer some insight into this problem, it would be highly appreciated. 

PyKota utilities (and backend) exit -1 when there's a problem 
parsing configuration file or when the original backend (for example 
ipp) being wrapped fails. PyKota's backend wrapper exits 1 as 
expected when launched with no argument (backend enumeration mode), 
and also exits 1 when an unexpected condition (call it a bug if you 
want) is encountered. In any other case it exits 0.

So in any condition where exit code is not 0 (unless when 
enumerating backends), a manual intervention is expected anyway, and 
so the print queue has to be stopped, which is done. 

Of course since I've never seen your code I don't know if this
helps or not.

bye

Jerome Alet