How do I ensure job order

[Petrus Rossouw]

Hi All,

We use CUPS on HP-UX as the main LPD printing solution to about 300 printers at customer sites accross the WAN.
It is very important for us to print jobs in the order they were submitted to the particular printer. This is in particular important for our cheque printers which prints the cheque number on the stub and has to agree with the routing number on the actual cheque stock.

The default behaviour of CUPS is to stop the job/printer when the back-end fails.
The problem is that quite frequently the LPD backend exits with status 1 when it sends the control file to the remote printer server.
This stops the printer and our customer then needs to call us to start the job.
Operators has to ensure that before starting the printer that the job is not stopped, to ensure job order.

For the regular laser printers, I thought of setting the error-policy of the printer to retry, but this puts the job on hold for 30 seconds and in the meantime prints the next job in the queue, which also causes the jobs to print out of sequence.
So I can't simply change the error-policy for the printers to stop them from stopping the printer.

Is there a way to configure the system to indefinately retry sending the first job in the queue and it will not continue to the next job unless the first job is completed or an operator cancels the job.