Dealing with Printer Emergencies

All kinds of bad things can happen to good printers- say, a new toner cartridge can break and spill toner into the innards of the printer, or someone can use the wrong transparency and melt it in the printer. Here's what to do when those things happen:

First, Don't Panic. I know, that's easy for me to say...

Now that you're done panicking, the most important thing to do immediately is to shut down the print queue. But, before you do that, you should probably check the queue and notify the owners of jobs currently in it that their job isn't going to print on that printer anytime soon. After you've done that, shut down the print queue:

First, if you don't know the real name of the printer (it should be hpxx, where xx are numbers), type:

%printers | grep printername

The name you're using will appear in a list like this one:

Log into bigdog as root and type:

#lpc down hpxx "some descriptive message about the problem"

This disables queuing for this printer while you fix the problem. You should get a response something like this:

It would also be a good idea to send out an email to kerr@ucolick.org, with a CC to nics@ucolick.org, explaining what happened and recommending alternative printers.

OK, now the print queue isn't growing and won't fill the root partition, and everyone who uses the printer knows that they shouldn't for the time being. You have some options now.

Probably the best thing is to do as little as possible. If the machine is under warranty, and the accident is such that the warranty would cover it (ie an HP toner cartridge breaking in an HP printer), you should call their techs out and let them do the work. They probably have better tools for dealing with these situations than you do, and (presumably) have more experience with printer emergencies as well.