HP Distributed Print Service Administration Guide

308 Chapter10

Managing Supervisors and Physical Printers

Querying for Physical Printer Information

This section describes how to query for the values of attributes that

reﬂect the status of physical printers.

Querying for the State of a Physical Printer

Use the pdls command with the -c printer ﬂag to query for the state of

a speciﬁc physical printer. The results of this query also indicate whether

the physical printer is enabled. You might query the state of the physical

printer if it is not accepting and printing jobs. Depending on the

notiﬁcation proﬁle for the physical printer, you might receive notiﬁcation

messages informing you of problems. Certain printer states indicate a

problem with thephysical printer, whileothers indicate that the physical

printer is working correctly.

For example, to query for the state of physical printer PhyPrt4 and to

determine whether it is enabled, enter:

pdls -c printer PhyPrt4

HPDPS displays information similar to the following:

Printer Realization State Enabled Queue

------- ----------- ----- ------- ------

PhyPrt4 physical idle true Queue3

This indicates that the physical printer is enabled. If it were not, the

value shown in the Enabled column would be false.

Physical Printer States

The possible states of the physical printer are:

connecting-to-printer The physical printer has received a job and

is trying to connect to its printer device. After it

connects to the device, the physical printer locks the

printer device until it ﬁnishes processing the job so

that another print system cannot use the device. This

applies to the tcpip attachment-type.

idle The physical printer is waiting for a job.

needs-attention The physical printer can connect to the printer

device, but for some reason, the printer cannot print.