Advanced printer configuration

Specifying a printer fault recovery mechanism

NOTE: This section does not apply if you are making a remote printer accessible to users on your system.

When a printer fault has been fixed and the printer is ready for printing again, the print service will recover in one of three ways:

it will continue printing at the top of the page where printing stopped
it will restart printing at the beginning of the print request that was active when the fault occurred
it will wait for you to tell the print service to re-enable the printer

NOTE: The ability to continue printing at the top of the page where printing stopped requires the use of a filter that can wait for a printer fault to be cleared before resuming properly. Such a filter has to have detailed knowledge of the control sequences used by the printer so it can keep track of page boundaries and know where in a file printing stopped. None of the filters supplied with the print service can do this. If a proper filter is not being used, you will be notified in an alert if recovery cannot proceed as you want.

To specify the way the print service will recover after a fault has been cleared, enter one of the following commands:

/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p printer-name -F continue
/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p printer-name -F beginning
/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p printer-name -F wait

These commands direct the print service to continue at the top of the page, restart from the beginning, or wait for you to enter an enable(1M) command to re-enable the printer.

If you do not specify how the print service is to resume after a printer fault, it will try to continue at the top of the page where printing stopped or, failing that, at the beginning of the print request.

If the recovery is continue, but the interface program does not stay running so that it can detect when the printer fault has been cleared, printing will be attempted every few minutes until it succeeds. You can force the print service to retry immediately by issuing an enable command.