Feature Request - Never stop printers

[John E. Vincent]

There have been quite a few posts where people are having issues with printers disabling themselves because of things like socket timeouts or out of paper and what not.

Helge has made the recommendation that you could modify the backend you use to always return 0 no matter what. Some of us have written scripts that check every so often and enable any disabled printers.

Mike,
Is it possible we could get a config option that handles this for us? Something along the lines of a NeverStop or NeverDisable?

I've posted many times on our situation (check the archives) and the number of printers (over 1000+) and our environment (retail). I recently upgraded to the latest version of cups and this problem is biting us where it didn't before.

Our printers will always run out of paper especially our check printers where we don't keep paper in them because our employees have to enter the check number on the preprinted check they are about to use. We also have issues where the broadband at the store goes down for 10 or 15 minutes and the printer goes disabled. We want the jobs to start printing as soon as the broadband comes back up.

Our printers are all HP LaserJet 13xx printers with HP USB PrintServers. Becuase they are so tightly intertwined, the PrintServer will refuse connections when the lid is open, out of paper or when the paper tray is open. If this is going on for longer than x timeout, the printer is now getting disabled. This is only a temporary situation and we want the jobs to start printing again as soon as x problem is resolved. We don't stop doing business because the printer is having issues. Our customers are more than happy to wait for the contract and checks to print because that's why they came in.

Am I off base on this? I guess I could increase the timeout but that seems almost hackish to me as does a script that runs every 5 minutes to enable any disabled printers.

CUPS does a WONDERFUL job with catching up a backed up queue as soon as printer comes online again. Our printers that handle our hylafax jobs always run out of paper and CUPS is glad to let the queue back up. As soon as Monday comes and paper is added, the jobs start coming right out. That's the environment we're looking for from CUPS.

Thanks.