[cups] Broken Pipe, work arounds causing report surprise restarts midstream

[Smith, Ed]

Greetings,

A long print job on our HP8150 was in an "abort" status this morning. Formerly, jobs ended in a 'stopped' status.  This time the printer continued to print subsequent reports.I found a report that only printed 200 of 800 pages, so that's when I went back to find it.  I did a reprint and we were off and running.  This is a new scenario.  It was less visible because we didn't know we had a problem until we reviewed the printed reports, whereas we used to know we had a problem because the printer would stop. "

Prior to this, we had been experiencing broken pipe errors so I worked around it by setting RetryInterval=1h and Timeout 3600 in cupsd.conf, and printer-error-policy=retry-job  instead of stop-job  in printers.conf. this is eliminated the broken pipe error. ( The broken pipe error was often caused or correlated to a paper fault of some kind, but in the case of the printer just restarting a report mentioned above, it was not necessarily started by a paper fault.  I ran a wireshark capture earlier on when we were having the broken pipe error, and it showed that the cups server was keeping the TCP connection open, but the printer was ignoring the server. the cups print server is on a different subnet than the printer, with a low bandwidth connection, so I don't think the printer is being overwhelmed, although the printer does look like it needed a break. Sometimes this was just an out of paper condition).  I need a better understanding of what is going on. I had been running cups 1.2.6 prior to this without any of these issues.  This can occur when the network is not very busy.

Our reports are PostScript coming from the applications, and our printers have hardware postscript installed, so we print raw. This has worked well for many years. We started having probs when we went to the new cups version.

Cups version 1.3.7
RHEL 5.9

Any insight appreciated.
Thanks!

Ed J Smith