[cups.general] LPR print queues become disabled after printergoes offline

Ambrose Li ambrose.li at gmail.com
Wed Jun 14 21:04:39 PDT 2006


On 14/06/06, Michael Sweet <mike at easysw.com> wrote:
> In short, this is not an error, but a feature.  Really.  If the
> printer breaks for an unknown reason, CUPS stops the queue by default
> to avoid loss of data.

FWIW, I also consider this to be a bug, though fortunately I haven't
been hit, mostly because no one except me really use CUPS here.

In my previous job, we had set up a Windows 3.x box as a print server;
it disabled the queue every day, usually because a user had pressed
the Online button to pause the printer to get the printouts. Its users
complained every morning, and it just drove me nuts. And because it is
stashed on the top of a cabinet, I have to find a monitor to plug in,
then plug in a keyboard, just to go to the Print Manager to pull down
a menu to reenable the queue. I ended up wiping the whole hard disk
and installed Linux with lpr, and I never had to worry about the queue
being stopped. The number of support calls related to that printer
almost overnight dropped to zero.

CUPS 1.x's behaviour, as described, would be like Windows 3.x. To
certain people (including myself), it would certainly be perceived as
a bug and a step backward from lpr. Certainly, with the web interface
and Linux's native remote control capabilities, it would still be
better than Win 3.x, but the default behaviour would still be a
support nightmare.





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