Re: remote outq problem

Hi Lou,

I saw your follow-up posting mentioning that most of the printers having
trouble were dot matrix printers. These printers are usually perceived as
quite slow in the eyes of the IBM host. Once a job begins printing, no other
host can gain access to the print server attached to the dot matrix printer
until the job has been completely printed (it might be a rather looong time
that the printer and print server are busy).

If a job is being printed from a host other than the IBM host, the print
server will tell OS/400 that it is currently busy and that the IBM host
should contact it again in a few minutes. OS/400 is not terribly patient in
terms of waiting for this limitation to be cleared and this can sometimes
cause a spool file to get stuck in SND status as you mention.

Adding the value XAUTOQ to the DESOPT parameter of the Remote Output Queue
can sometimes help resolve this type of issue. The XAUTOQ option tells the
LPR client of OS/400 to spool the file to itself if it is not deliverable
after a timeout that you configure on the IBM host. If the timer expires,
the file is sent from OS/400 LPR to the OS/400 LPD and then placed back into
the same output queue to have its delivery tried again.

For some customers, this feature keeps their OS/400 remote output queues
from getting hung up when the target network printer is known to be busy
quite often.

HTH

Best Regards,

/Paul
--
Paul Tykodi
National Product Manager
Print 4Sight Inc.

p: 603-431-0606 x115
f: 603-436-6432
E-mail: p.tykodi@print4sight.com
www.print4sight.com

Special Note: On November 30th, 2002, Print 4Sight Inc. acquired the
business assets and business activity of Intermate US Inc.

Print 4Sight Inc. as an official North American distributor will continue to
sell and support Intermate and Praim Printing products from current offices
in Portsmouth, NH, USA.>Date: Wed, 29 Jan 2003 16:05:41 -0500

>From: "Lou Schmaus" <lschmaus@link400.com>
>Subject: remote outq problem
>
>One of our customers has a recurring problem with remote outq's. They are a
>large trucking outfit. They have a fairly large and complex network in
their
>main terminal, which is 700,000-800,000 sq. ft., with offices in all parts
>of the building. They use a variety of dot matrix, copy machines, Laser
>printers, and line-printers to print Bills of Lading, manifests, etc...
They
>mostly use Jetdirect or Linksys print servers, but some of the copy
machines
>and lasers have built in Ethernet.
>
>For some reason, their remote outq's just "go to sleep" for hours at a
time.
>The spool files have a status of 'SND', but nothing prints. We can ping the
>print servers, we can log on to the ones that have built-in web servers and
>print test pages. We just can't print anything from the /400. Sometimes
>resetting everything works, sometimes not. Sometimes even deleting and
>recreating the outq doesn't work. And then, when you least expect it, stuff
>starts printing again.
>
>I'm leaning towards a configuration problem somewhere, a timeout value that
>is set too low or too high. I'll be stopping by there tonight to start
>checking the values on the /400 today, but any suggestions or hints would
be
>greatly appreciated.
>
>--------------------------
>Lou Schmaus
>MIS Director
>Apparel Distribution, Inc.
>lou@appareld.com