Serial printer woes

[dietz]

Hi,

I have been wrestling with a serial attached printer issue now for the past couple of days and am in desperate need of some new ideas.

IBM 6F1 ( newly installed)
AIX 4.3.3.
8 port asyn adpt
IBM 6400 line printer

We are able to print single and multiply small job however the printer goes to a down state if a large job is ran. The number of pages that is printed varies. Flow control is set to Xon on both printer and lp01. File systems have plenty of space. We receive the following error message via root mail after the queue goes down and we attempt to bring it back up.

0782-054 Error detected during output to printer.
The device name is lp0 (generic)
The errno (error number) from the write system call is 6
Use local problem reporting procedures.

We looked up the 054 code and none of the suggestion helped.
So anyone out there that can help shed light on this will forever be my hero *:->*

 

[aixqueen]

Well I believe there is a driver for your printer in AIX 4.3.3 ....and I would certainly use that instead of generic.

Second, xon xoff is really not the best for doing flow control, it can start a job, print what is in the buffer of the printer and then stop..or not send the signal on the right pin and then you lose it all.......... so that may be part of your problem.
Serial printers:

http://techsupport.services.ibm.com...mode=9&documents=092220739323166&database=aix

Flow control info (probably your problem)

http://techsupport.services.ibm.com...mode=9&documents=390605202814658&database=aix

Check your cable pin outs for the 6400 to be sure it is doing full pins
it may be sending on the wrong pin and then it would only print what is in the buffer and then stop...

 

[dietz]

Madam Queen,

Our app manipulates the printers as well and we have found that the generic driver solves more problems than not.

Your suggestion confirms our beliefs with this issue being a flow control or cable problem. Last night we were able to get the large jobs to print by setting the baud rate from 9600 to 2400. This is a bandaid fix but at least the users are semi happy for now. We are going to have the customer investigate the cables and I will look into the flow control issue as well. Thanks so much for the links.

dietz

PS Yes you now are my hero... *:->*