Printing Issues 1

[markwilkinson]

We are running SCO Openserver 5.0.7 and have a number of printers attached using HP Direct Print Servers. The printing works fine almost all of the time but every now and again an end user reports a problem with printing. They select the print option from our application and nothing happens. If the user logs out and back in again and then retrys the printing works fine.

We've captured the error in our application; it's as follows:

"UX:lp: ERROR: Can't establish contact with the LP print service.
TO FIX: Either the LP print service has stopped,
or all message channels are busy. If the
problem continues, get help from your
system administrator."

Does anyone have any ideas?

 

[motoslide]

I've had a similar issue once where the user has too many processes running. 98% of them were in the "defunct" stage, basically doing nothing, but the O/S was configured to only allow 100 processes per user (or something similar), and the print process was unable to launch. When the symptom is present, do a "ps -ef|grep USERNAME" and see what you get.

If this turns out to be the cause, there is still an underlying issue to be tracked down.

"Proof that there is intelligent life in Oregon. Well, Life anyway.

 

[markwilkinson]

Sorry for the delay in the reply but this issue has taken some time to get to the bottom of, but I thought it would be worth reporting back. The application we use has a "Stock Search" pop up screen which is called when the user hits the F2 key. We have found that a handful of users keep pressing the F2 key to instigate a new search. Each instance of the "Stock Search" eats into the resources available to the user until it affects other aspects of the system - in our case the printing.

It's rather strange though that in our environment the multiple "Stock Search" screens do not appear as separate processes so we have just stumbled upon this issue by chance. However the prevous post definatly helped us by making us think about the root cause of our problem, so many thanks for the reply.

 

[KenCunningham]

Thanks for posting back Mark, it's always good to have a resolution to a thread no matter how belated! Have a star.

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