Hi, is it somehow possible to make CUPS automatically redirect jobs, and following jobs, away from printers which can not print them to other printers that can print them until the printers that couldn't print them are again able to print them? Like I have a bunch of label printers which are all the same, and all of which are prone to run out of labels or out of ribbon every now and then. It can take hours or even days before someone can refill a printer. Hence it would be very useful if CUPS could be told something like "if printer A doesn't print, move its current job to printer B and divert all new jobs sent to A to printer B instead until A prints again". What exactly happens when a printer that is member of a class can not print a job that was sent to the class? Will the unprintable job be automatically moved to another member of the same class, or will it only be aborted and never printed? With a class of two printers and one of them running out of labels, /var/log/cups/error_log only holds: ... [Job 174733] Stopping unresponsive job. What does this mean? Has the job been printed or not? Has it been printed after I refilled the printer?
On Tue, 20 Aug 2019, hw wrote:> is it somehow possible to make CUPS automatically redirect jobs, and > following jobs, away from printers which can not print them to other > printers that can print them until the printers that couldn't print > them are again able to print them?IIRC CUPS has printer classes or some such thing. A user can send a job to a class and CUPS will direct it within that class as it sees fit. Presumaly if one printer is stil chewing on last week's job, CUPS will see fit to direct subsequent jobs elsewhere. -- Michael hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.NoDak.edu "Sorry but your password must contain an uppercase letter, a number, a haiku, a gang sign, a heiroglyph, and the blood of a virgin." -- someeecards
On Thu, 22 Aug 2019 11:48:37 -0500 (CDT) Michael Hennebry <hennebry at web.cs.ndsu.nodak.edu> wrote:> On Tue, 20 Aug 2019, hw wrote: > > > is it somehow possible to make CUPS automatically redirect jobs, and > > following jobs, away from printers which can not print them to other > > printers that can print them until the printers that couldn't print > > them are again able to print them? > > IIRC CUPS has printer classes or some such thing. > A user can send a job to a class and CUPS will > direct it within that class as it sees fit. > Presumaly if one printer is stil chewing on last week's job, > CUPS will see fit to direct subsequent jobs elsewhere.Well, yes, and I am not sure (at least not yet) if print jobs for a class are diverted to other members of the class or not. It seems that data kept in the printer buffer and in the print-server the printers are connected to can make it difficult to figure what is actually going on. A much bigger problem are printers that are not members of classes, though. Such printers are not members of classes because they are at physically different locations, and employees would have to go to from one printer to another to collect the lables. Yet if a printer doesn't print anymore, it is desirable to divert jobs to another printer, preferably a designated fallback. It is of no use when the jobs get stuck in the queue until the printer is being maintained which can be days later.