HP Distributed Print Service Administration Guide

298 Chapter10

Managing Supervisors and Physical Printers

Monitoring Supervisor and Physical Printer Conﬁgurations

Monitoring Supervisor and Physical Printer

Conﬁgurations

The tasks in this section involve tracking changes made to supervisors

and physical printers by:

• deﬁning how and when to use the message attribute

• creating archive ﬁles for supervisors and supervisor objects

Setting the message Attribute for Supervisors and

Supervisor Objects

Use the -m ﬂag with any command that modiﬁes a supervisor or physical

printer 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 physical printer PhyPrt1, enter the

command:

pddisable -c printer -m "Disabling PhyPrt1 - \

changing the media. Submit jobs after \

2:00 p.m. 7/24" PhyPrt1

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

for information relating to why the physical printer is not accepting jobs.

For example, they can enter the command:

pdls -c printer -r message PhyPrt1

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. An alternate decision would be to

use this ﬂag whenever you change the state of a supervisor or physical

printer for a signiﬁcant period of time. Or you might elect to use the -m

ﬂag whenever you modify an object with the pdset command. This

allows you to record why the values for an attribute or attributes were

changed, who changed them, and when the changes were made.