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From: David Chappell <David.Chappell@mail.trincoll.edu> Date: Fri, 02 Feb 2001 20:46:04 +0000 Subject: Re: Antwort: Re: PPR: ppr newbie Alain.Lachapelle@Heimannsystems.Com wrote > > On the subject of printer errors I have tried today with a paper jam. The > paper jam situation was there with the A4 paper size. I then polled the > status of the printer with: > > § ppop -M status hp5simx > hp5simx idle > > It showed the printer as idle. I also tried with "ppop alerts" but there were no alerts. So I thought that perhaps it > needed a print job to report status, so I sent one like this: > > $ ppr -d hp5simx -F 'PageSize=A4' -m none -B false pi1.ps > WARNING: Procset "a2ps-a2ps-hdr" has no version and revision numbers > WARNING: Procset "a2ps-black+white-Prolog" has no version and revision numbers > WARNING: Resource "procset a2ps-a2ps-hdr 0 0" declared Supplied but isn't included > WARNING: Resource "procset a2ps-black+white-Prolog 0 0" declared Supplied but isn't included > > § ppop -M status hp5simx > hp5simx printing hp5simx-53 0 operation: Connecting... > > After several "Connecting..." messages the status reported a retry pause: > > § ppop -M status hp5simx > hp5simx engaged 1 50 > > $ ppop list all > hp5simx-53 lachap 01:15PM 001 waiting for printer > > And then "npadmin --display 10.180.30.100" (a SNMP MIB utility) reported what was on the printer's display, that is, an error message about the paper > jam. > > The printer is a HP LJ5 SiMX and here is its' PPR configuration: > The problem here is that sometimes when HP printers go off-line they stop accepting connections on port 9100. If PPR can't connect it can't retrieve the status. This isn't a problem with the atalk interface since the AppleTalk Printer Access Protocol provides for returning the printer status when refusing a connection. The npadmin program uses SNMP to fetch the status. The printer answers SNMP queries even when it isn't accepting connections. I have wanted for some time to add an SNMP query to get the status when a connection is refused, but I have been stymied by the fact that the Simple Network Management Protocol uses a very complicated packet encoding. However, this week I finally tracked down all the necessary documents and produced a simple SNMP query function. I will be incorporating a call to this function into the tcpip interface.