RE: remote outq problem -- MIDRANGE-L

Paul,

All the remote outq setups have XAUTOQ and XAIX in the destination options.
It's a habit we picked up long ago when dealing with dot matrix printers on
print servers. I've just never seen it this bad before. I've ended the outq
in question, walked out on the dock, verified the printer was online and had
paper, turned the print server and printer off and on again just for good
luck, walked back to the office, started the writer back up, and the spool
file still goes to 'SND' and stays there. Then, half an hour later, the
printer starts.

I added quite a bit of memory to the *SPOOL pool, and increased the number
of active jobs in the pool, and I'll see if that has any effect. It would
not be unusual for this location to have over 20 printers running reports at
once, with one or two of them being huge multi-1000 page reports.

--------------------------
Lou Schmaus
MIS Director
Apparel Distribution, Inc.
lou@appareld.com

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@midrange.com
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@midrange.com]On Behalf Of Paul Tykodi
Sent: Thursday, January 30, 2003 5:12 PM
To: midrange-l@midrange.com
Subject: 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.