HP Distributed Print Service Administration Guide

252 Chapter9

Managing Spoolers, Queues, and Logical Printers

Monitoring Spooler, Queue, and Logical Printer Conﬁgurations

Monitoring Spooler, Queue, and Logical

Printer Conﬁgurations

The tasks in this section involve making decisions on how to track

changes made to spooler, queue, and logical printer conﬁgurations by:

• deﬁning when and how to use the message attribute

• creating archive ﬁles for spoolers, queues, logical printers, and initial

value objects

Setting the Message Attribute for Spoolers, Queues,

and Logical Printers

Use the -m ﬂag with any command that modiﬁes a spooler, queue, logical

printer, or initial value object to set the text of the message attribute for

that object. You can specify a text string up to 4095 characters in length

that describes the modiﬁcations you are making.

For example, to set a message for logical printer LogPrt1 describing why

you are disabling the logical printer, enter:

pddisable -c printer -m "Disabling LogPrt1 - limiting the \

number of copies you can print to 1. Submit jobs after \

2:00 p.m. 6/12" LogPrt1

After you issue this command, users and other administrators can query

the logical printer for informationabout why the logical printerno longer

accepts jobs. For example, they could enter:

pdls -c printer -r message LogPrt1

You need to set a policy of how and when administrators and operators

will use the -m ﬂag to set the message attribute. You might decide to

never use the ﬂag or to always use it. Alternatively, you can use this ﬂag

whenever you change the state of a spooler, queue, or logical printer for a

signiﬁcant period of time. You may want to specify a message when you

disable a logical printer or pause a queue for more than an hour, but not

if you disable or pause them for only a few minutes.

You can also have a policy to use the -m ﬂag whenever you modify an

object with the pdset command. You can specify why the values for an