Howto monitor cupsd ?

Nathan Whitehorn nathanw at uchicago.edu
Mon Nov 6 23:14:22 PST 2006


> Hi,
>
> we have some trouble with our printserver. the cupsd is sometimes
> running, but not responding.
> So an /etc/init.d/cupsd status only shows a running cupsd,
> but the daemon is not doing anything.
> I was thinking about something like
> lpstat -t and check the output, but lpstat seem's to wait
> forever. Is there any timeout option ?
> Or another way to check if the cupsd IS working (not only be running)

I'm having the same problem (CUPS 1.2.2, FreeBSD 6.1). We have about 1800 users printing via IPP, often from windows, so the load from printer state polling is often high. They are authenticated through pam_ldap. It occasionally happens (once or twice a day) that the CUPS daemon will stop processing requests. The accept queue (as seen from netstat -aL) will increase to maximum, and nothing further happens until the daemon is killed. There's no obvious correlation with anything, but it's hard to tell, because if LogLevel is set to Debug, the log grows several megabytes a second. On Info, there's nothing obvious.

Just so this is somewhat useful to the original poster: one solution we're investigating is to check netstat -aL for the cupsd process on a cron job. If the listen queue is non-zero, wait a couple seconds and see if the listen queue is now smaller. If it isn't, kick the server over. This has the advantage over the cups commands that it won't block on a hung server, but is still a bad hack.
-Nathan




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