Print job printing out many times

[tom1681]

We have an Epson dot-matrix printer connceted to our AIX system via an HP JetDirect box. When some print jobs are sent to it (seems to be no pattern to which ones have the problem) once the printer has reached the end of the print job, it starts again, and will keep printing the whole job until I cancel the job from the queue. I have printed this directly from the shell as well as from our application and it occurs with both.

Any one any ideas what's causing this as it's driving me mad!

Thanks in advance.

 

[KenCunningham]

Are there any control chars at the end of the jobs being printed twice?

 

[tom1681]

There's always something I forget to mention...

There's absoloutly no escape codes or anything like that in the print jobs, it's just plain text.

 

[p5wizard]

Are they large jobs? May have something to do with memory constraints on the JetDirect box. Do you use LPD to connect to the JD box? I believe you can also ftp a print job to the JD box. Does this also occur with FTP?

 

[tom1681]

Thanks for your response. They are reasonably large (76kb), but larger ones have been ok. I FTP'd the print job to the JetDirect box and apart from being slower it only printed once leading me to believe it was an AIX issue.

The print command I'm using on AIX is lp -d printername.

 

[p5wizard]

If you have another server (even non-unix) that connects to the printer and also runs LPD-server, you could set it up so that AIX prints remotely to that server which then sends it to the printer.

I have a customer that will only allow WINTEL print servers (makes life easier for the operators they claim) and the AIX boxes print via LPD to the WINTEL servers.

I know it is an extra step but if it solves your problem, you may want to go for it.

 

[needcoffee]

I have experienced the a similar problem. In our case on queue was going DOWN in the middle of the job. The job was buffered in printer mem so it finished its first run. When the queue came back up the subsystem resent the job to the printer usually before the 1st job finished. This appeared to be a continous "loop"of the job going to the printer. I would try adjusting the backend time out on the queue. I set ours to 10 minutes and have not had any problems over a WAN connection.

Also, have you tried switching out the JetDirect. Maybe the mem is a little flakey causing it to send false requeue job commands back to the server.

Good Luck,
needcoffee