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