I have an ongoing problem with one of my clients' printers. It's an HP laserjet 5. It is connected to an FC1 workstation parallel. It prints mostly ascii reports and an occasional email or pdf from gnome. All jobs are queued to it from the FC2 server that is running the accounting programs and everyone's desktop. It mostly works OK. Except that every day or two cups will spontaneously disable it. This seems to occur after a particular job prints successfully. i.e. when I reenable the printer, the job prints again, in its entirety. I have set up a cron job on the FC2 server to watch for that disabled condition every 60 sec and reenable the printer. For the most part, they get an occasional duplicate print job. However, occasionally, the printer will hang, and reenabling does not help. At these times there is a cups "parallel" backend process trying to send to the printer, forever, but not doing anything. The printer shows to be "ready". I've replaced the FC1 box twice, the printer once, and the printer cable twice. >From the cups error_log on the FC1 box: I [18/Aug/2004:13:01:25 -0500] Adding start banner page "none" to job 859. I [18/Aug/2004:13:01:25 -0500] Adding end banner page "none" to job 859. I [18/Aug/2004:13:01:25 -0500] Job 859 queued on 'okc_svclaser' by 'holly'. I [18/Aug/2004:13:01:25 -0500] Started backend /usr/lib/cups/backend/parallel (PID 1664) for job 859. E [18/Aug/2004:13:01:25 -0500] ReadClient() 5 IPP Read Error! I see this when the printer gets disabled. So what is a "5 IPP read error?" On the FC2 server, I have a similar situation, where a job will just hang going out the parallel port to an HP 4050 right in the middle of a job. I'm wondering if parport in Fedora is not ready for real use? One other question. When cups disables a printer, why does it disable it permanently. Why no retry after 5 minutes or something? -Steve Bergman
