[cups] FW: Broken Pipe, work arounds causing report surprise restarts midstream UPDATE 2

Smith, Ed ed.smith at daikinapplied.com
Mon Jul 21 11:55:26 PDT 2014


Hi Helge, 

Speaking of sockets, does the IIRC - backchannel processing use any port in addition to 9100? A firewall sits between the cups server and the printers. 9100 is open, working for many years on Cups 1.2.6.  Just being thorough. 

We did upgrade our HP 8150 to a HP LJ M806, which improved things, but too soon say. 

Thanks!
Ed Smith

-----Original Message-----
From: Smith, Ed 
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2014 2:49 PM
To: 'The CUPS user discussion list.'
Subject: RE: [cups] Broken Pipe, work arounds causing report surprise restarts midstream

Hi Helge, 

I am using sockets. But did experiment with LPD and still got broken pipe error earlier on. Did not try LPD / retry-job combo.
Also, I have seen Broken pipe on a couple of our Ricohs (MP C4502 and MP 2852)) and an Intermec EasyCoder PM4i label printer. Also did see this on an HP 9050.  Just wanted to mention as variety of targets does vary some. 
I will contact you about the older backend soon.

Thanks! 
Ed Smith

-----Original Message-----
From: cups-bounces at cups.org [mailto:cups-bounces at cups.org] On Behalf Of Helge Blischke
Sent: Wednesday, July 09, 2014 12:17 PM
To: The CUPS user discussion list.
Subject: Re: [cups] Broken Pipe, work arounds causing report surprise restarts midstream


Am 09.07.2014 um 14:42 schrieb 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 cup s 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
>

I think your issue is due to two facts:
(1)	The design of this printer (HP 8150) isn't quite recent, and,  
unless forced to report status information
	by specific PJL statements (which CUPS filters do not use), tends to close the input connection
	when the whole job has beed read.
(2)	IIRC, the backchannel processing has been introduced with CUPS  
1.3.x, so the said behaviour
	of the printer (see above) causes an error.

You didn't tell how your printer is connected. If you use the socket backend, I could send you a (quite old) backend based on source code HP published years ago which
a) tells the printer to report status information (including logging error information to a specific file)
b) exits OK when the connection is closed by the printer.

If you are interested in this piece, e-mail me off the list and ask for backend hpnpf (source code) and / or backend hpnpf (description)

Helge
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