HP Distributed Print Service Administration Guide

312 Chapter10
Managing Supervisors and Physical Printers
Responding to Physical Printer State Problems
Printer needs-key-operator Problem
A physical printer enters the needs-key-operator state when it locks
the printer device but cannot print because it encounters an error. In this
case HPDPS automatically disables the physical printer and re-queues
the job to the spooler. After you fix the printer problem, you must enable
the physical printer with the pdenable command. This causes the
physical printer to return to the idle state and allows it to accept jobs
again.
HPDPS notifies you when the physical printer enters the
needs-key-operator state if the notification profile for the printer
specifies you are to receive notification messages for the
printer-needs-administrator event.
You can query the printer-state, enabled, and
printer-needs-key-operator-attention-time physical printer
attributes. The values of these attributes will confirm the state of the
physical printer, whether it is disabled, and indicate how long the
physical printer has been in the problem state. The brief set of physical
printer attributes includes the printer-state and enabled attributes.
To query these attributes, enter:
pdls -c printer -s column \
-r brief,printer-needs-key-operator-attention-time PhyPrt4
HPDPS displays information similar to the following:
Needs Key
Printer Realization State Enabled Queue Operator Time
------- ----------- ------------------- ------- ------ --------------
PhyPrt4 physical needs-key-operator false Queue4 23:44
After verifying the physical printer state, see “Physical Printer State is
“needs-key-operator”” on page 382 for the procedures you use to correct
the problem.
Printer has timed-out Problem
A physical printer enters the timed-out state when it cannot lock the
network printer device within the amount of time specified by the
physical printer printer-timeout-period attribute. This happens
when the printer device is already locked. The physical printer continues
trying to connect to the device. When it is successful, the physical printer