CUPS Stops Print Queue (should it?)

[Michael Sweet]

Anonymous wrote:
> ...
> I don't understand the philosophy of taking a printer offline after a
> failure.  The source for the backend enters a retry loop if it fails

Put simply, we cannot determine whether a file has printed or what
has caused the error.  The only safe course of action is to stop the
printer until the administrator has resolved the problem.

> ...
> It seems that the scheduler should keep trying to print.

We don't do this by default because we have no way of knowing
whether a sporadic error has caused the failure or a problem with
the print file.

> I am also curious if this behavior (shutting down a print queue) is
> documented somewhere.

The IDD, SDD, and (IIRC) the SAM describe this behavior.

You'll be happy to know that CUPS 1.2 adds an error policy attribute
which allows you to configure how CUPS handles these errors...

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Publishing Software        http://www.easysw.com