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.