Printing tips and problems

Last revision July 29, 2004

• You can see where your job lies in the print queue. Login to pangea with Samson or another telnet type program and issue one of these commands with the appropriate queue name:

  lpq -Pa65-laserjet
  lpq -Pa65-color-inkjet
  lpq -Pptolemy

• If you want to use non-standard paper, use the lower tray or the manual feed option if possible. Otherwise, add a couple of extra identification pages at the beginning of your job. When you see one coming out of the printer, quickly pull out the paper tray to stop printing, insert your special paper, and let the job finish.
• Paper jams are rare. The printer will stop and indicate a jam on its control panel. If you cannot figure out how to clear the jam, turn the printer off, leave a note on the printer, and contact the A65 lab manager.
• Some print jobs never print, although everything seems fine. First aid for this problem is to stop the queue on pangea, cycle power to the printer off and back on again, and restart the queue. This clears out any configurations or definitions left in the printer's memory from a previous job which may be interfering with proper interpretation of a new job. First, log into pangea and issue a command to stop the queue. Anyone can do this; no special privilege is needed. For example, the command to stop the a65-laserjet queue for the HP LaserJet 4050TN in Mitchell A65 is

  op lpc abort a65-laserjet

  The job that is currently trying to print will be saved. Next, power cycle the printer. After it has warmed back up to the "ready" state, restart the queue on pangea, for example,

  op lpc start a65-laserjet

  It may take a few minutes before printing starts while pangea re-establishes its connection with the printer.
• If you see "garbage" pages coming out, turn off the printer! This stops paper wastage for the moment, but the offending job still needs to be removed from the queue. This can be done by the user who submitted it, using the pangea lprm command, or by the System Manager.