Print auditing

[holidaydoc]

First, I apologize if this is an ignorant question. I consider myself strong with NT but a beginner with UNIX.

I have an application on a UNIX box, Solaris 8. A daemon gathers database rows at a certain status to create an SQR. The documents can be found in the var/spool/print directory; but occasionally one will stick. The three files that make up the print job are present and of course my users say the document never printed.

Without going further into the details, I would like to know if there is a way to audit the output, and other functions, from the spooler. I need to know if this job was ignored and why. Or was it processed but not "cleaned up". This is a fairly elementary task in NT, I am hoping for the same in UNIX.

Thanks in advance.
doc

 

[Annihilannic]

To get detailed logs from the printing subsystem you can add a line such as the following to /etc/syslog.conf:

[tt]lpr.debug /var/lp/logs/lpr.debug[/tt]

Note that the white space has to be tabs.

Then touch /var/lp/logs/lpr.debug to create it.

Then do a kill -HUP pid where pid is the process ID of your syslogd process to make it reread the configuration file.

Best to take it out again (and do the kill -HUP again) when you've finished as the log file can get very large very quickly.

Unfortunately I haven't had much luck troubleshooting these kind of print issues either. There isn't even a man page for printd, which does the work. UNIX printing continues to be a black art! Annihilannic.

 

[holidaydoc]

Annihilannic,
Thanks for the suggestion. I will give it a try. I agree about this being a 'black art' as I have had so much trouble getting good information about this topic.