Specifications

6-41
System V Printer Configuration
Specifying a Printer Fault Recovery Mechanism
Note: This information does not apply if you are making a remote printer accessible to
users on your system.
When a printer fault has been fixed and the printer is ready for printing again, the print
service will recover in the following ways:
• It will continue printing at the top of the page where printing stopped
• It will restart printing at the beginning of the print request that was active when the fault
occurred
• It will wait for you to tell the print service to re–enable the printer
Note: The ability to continue printing at the top of the page where printing stopped
requires the use of a filter that can wait for a printer fault to be cleared before resuming
properly. Such a filter must have detailed knowledge of the control sequences used by
the printer so it can keep track of page boundaries and know where in a file printing
stopped. None of the filters supplied with the print service can do this. If an appropriate
filter is not being used, you will be notified in an alert if recovery cannot proceed as you
want.
To specify the way the print service will recover after a fault has been cleared, enter one of
the following commands:
/usr/sbin/lpadmin –p printer–name –F continue
/usr/sbin/lpadmin –p printer–name –F beginning
/usr/sbin/lpadmin –p printer–name –F wait
These commands direct the print service to continue at the top of the page, restart from the
beginning, or wait for you to enter an enable command to re–enable the printer.
If you do not specify how the print service is to resume after a printer fault, it will try to
continue at the top of the page where printing stopped or, failing that, at the beginning of the
print request.
If the recovery is continue, but the interface program does not stay running so that it can
detect when the printer fault has been cleared, printing will be attempted every few minutes
until it succeeds. You can force the print service to retry immediately by issuing an enable
command.
Alerting to Mount Forms and Font Cartridges
If you have printers that accept changeable font cartridges and you have listed the font
cartridges allowed on each, users can submit a print request to use a particular font
cartridge. However, if the font cartridge is not mounted when a user requests to use it, the
job waits in the queue until you mount the font cartridge. See Specifying Font Cartridges to
Use With a Printer on page 6-39. If a form (or font cartridge) is not mounted when you print
a file and specify that form, the job waits in the queue until you mount the appropriate form.
See Mounting a Form on page 6-17.
In these cases, you might want to set up the print system to alert you when you need to
mount a form. You can specify that you are to receive alerts when the number of requests
waiting for a font cartridge or form exceeds some threshold.
To arrange for alerting to the need to mount a form, enter:
lpforms –f form_name –A alert_method –Q number –W minutes
alert_method alerting method to use (mail, write, or a desired command)
number number of waiting requests to restart alerting
minutes number of minutes between alerts