printstatus(1)
printstatus - graphical printer status tool
As shipped in IRIX 6.5.5. Unchanged since IRIX 6.5.
NAME printstatus - graphical printer status tool SYNOPSIS printstatus [ options... ] printername PrintStatus is an alias for printstatus DESCRIPTION printstatus, also known as PrintStatus, provides a graphical interface for monitoring printers under the AT&T System V print spooling system. The program can be displayed on 24-bit, 8-bit, and 1-bit X displays. Command Line Options -e updateInterval Specifies the interval, in seconds, between updates of the printer engine status information. This includes the icon itself and the Current Printer Status area of the interface. This information is polled whether printstatus is iconified or not. -q updateInterval Specifies the interval, in seconds, between updates of the printer request queue status. This includes the queue itself; the information in the "Printer Request Queue" area of the printstatus window. This information is NOT polled when the printstatus is iconified. -s updateInterval Specifies the interval, in seconds, between updates of the spooler system status. This includes the general spooler information, including whether the spooler queue for this printer is enabled or disabled. This information is NOT polled when the printstatus window is iconified. -iconic A very useful method of invoking printstatus is either to invoke it with the -iconic X Toolkit option or to iconify it once running. When iconified, printstatus continues to monitor the printer, and the application icon will change to reflect the current printer state. If the icon displays an undesirable state, opening the icon will give detailed information on the printer's condition. When iconified, printstatus performs only the minimal amount of polling necessary to keep the icon updated properly. Therefore, iconifying printstatus is good etiquette when monitoring shared network printers, as the iconified printstatus generates very little load on your network and on your network host. printername Specifies the printer that is to perform the printing. printername specifies the printer name. If the printername option is not specified then the printer selected will be the value of the LPDEST environment variable. If LPDEST is not set, the system default printer will be selected. If there is no system default printer, an error message to that effect will be printed and the program will exit. Program Usage The printstatus program presents a status panel that consists of four main areas. These areas are the menu bar, the printer information and icon area, the printer status message area, and the printer queue area. These areas are described below. Menu Bar The menu bar provides four submenus: Printer, Queue, Other Tools, and Help. The Printer menu contains options to send a test page to the printer, to request that the printer status be updated immediately, and to quit the program. Note that the test page will not be affected by any printer-specific settings you may have set using the PrintPanel tool. The Queue menu contains options to cancel jobs and to modify queueing options. To cancel a job, select that job in the queue, and then select the cancel job menu option. If the job you select was not submitted from your workstation, the cancel job menu choice will be disabled. To set queueing options, you must be running the tool as the system adminstrator. To toggle job acceptance for the local printer queue, simply select the menu choice Printer Accepting Your Jobs and the state of that function will be toggled. To toggle job printing for the local printer queue, simply select the menu choice Printer Printing Your Jobs and the state of that function will be toggled. The state of these toggle buttons is automatically updated at set intervals in case the printer queue is modified from outside PrintStatus. The Other Tools menu allows you to launch other printing- related tools, such as the PrintPanel for submitting jobs and setting printer-specific options, PrintManager for adding and deleting printers, and PrintStatus for another printer. If any of these programs is not properly installed, its menu entry will be greyed out. The Help menu allows you to launch an online help dialog, which should provide helpful information. It better, or it isn't doing its job. Printer Information And Icon Area The top left portion of the printstatus main panel contains the printer status icon, and the top right contains several lines of information about that printer. The icon graphically displays the current state of the printer being monitored. There are three states: Idle, Printing, and Faulted. The idle state is indicated by a plain printer icon on a green background. The Printing state is indicated by a printer icon plus a stack of waiting paper on a yellow background. The faulted state is indicated by a broken printer on a red background. (See the Printer Status Message Area description below for more detailed status.) The textual printer information presented is the name of the printer as known to your local spooler, the model and type of printer as it was installed on the printer host, and the method of connection. If the printer is locally connected, a device such as '/dev/plp' will be listed here. If the printer is a remote printer connected to another system, the name of that host system will be listed. Printer Status Message Area This area contains two major features. First is the current printer state, which is one of Idle, Printing, or Faulted. These states correspond to the green, yellow, and red icons, respectively. Detailed printer status information is presented in the scrollable list immediately below. Look in this area to determine what the nature of the faulted condition may be. Common problems such as out of paper or offline are easily diagnosed from where you sit using this information. If the printer you are monitoring is not an Impressario printer, it may not be capable of reporting this detailed status. In that case the icon and the status area may not ever change, and a message to that effect will be placed in the status area. In this case you may find it useful to resize the status list area by dragging the lower sash up to the upper sash, thereby conserving screen real estate. You may also wish to upgrade the printer server to an Impressario printer server to obtain the detailed feedback which that package provides. Printer Queue Area The jobs currently in the queue for this printer are displayed here. To cancel a job, select that job and then pull down the queue menu, releasing your mouse button on the Cancel Selected Job entry. If you are running the tool as the administrator, you may also be provided with the opportunity to forward the job to another printer. PROGRAM RESOURCES printstatus is written using the standard X toolkit and the Motif widget set. The program accepts all standard Xt/Motif resources and command line options. NOTES printstatus submits test jobs only to the AT&T System V print spooler. The BSD spooling system is not currently supported. printstatus by default updates the status information every 5 seconds, the queue every 15 seconds, and the general information such as the presence of the Other Tools menu entries and queueing state (enabled, accepting) every 30 seconds. These values may be changed by specifying the -e, -q, and -s options. Remembering that these values are polled at set intervals may be helpful in understanding why some status updates are not immediate. Selecting Update Printer Status immediately updates all three classes of status information, without resetting any of the other timers. KNOWN BUGS printstatus polls for spooler information by using libspool(3), which, because of limitations in the System VR3 spooler, must use rshd(1M) to query remote spooler information. If your printer host has access logging turned on, this polling behavior can result in large system log files if users leave their printstatus windows around for long periods. The proper solution to this is to iconify your printstatus windows: printstatus does not use rshd(1M) to query engine status (see -e switch, above), and thus will not log accesses on the printer host. Iconifying printstatus generates the lowest resource utilization: all engine status queries are done via the highly efficient RPC mechanism inside libpod(3). SEE ALSO lp(1), lpadmin(1M), PrintPanel(1) FILES /usr/lib/X11/app-defaults/Printstatus Program resource file