School of Informatics and Computing

If a printer has stopped printing and there are jobs in the queue waiting to be printed, you can follow these steps to get it printing again.

1. Verify that the printer has paper and that there are no reported paper jams. If the printer is out of paper, you can get more paper from LH210. If the printer front panel says something like "79 Service", you will need to power-cycle the printer.

2. If the printer is not reporting any errors and it has paper but is still not printing, you can use the lpkick command to restart the printer. For example, to restart the printer named ps1, just run "lpkick ps1" from a command prompt on any CS system.

3. If, after running lpkick, the printer is still not printing you can power-cycle it by turning it off, counting to 10, and turning it back on.

4. If, after the power-cycle, it is still not printing run lpkick again.

5. If it is still not printing, then the current print job may be causing problems. Use the lpq command on any CS Sun machine to find out which print job is first in the queue. If this is your print job, use the lprm command to remove it from the print queue. For example:

           % lpq -Pps1
           ps1 is ready and printing
           Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)      Total Size
           active  robh    795     file1        978497 bytes
           1st     robh    796     file2        933028 bytes
           % lprm -Pps1 795
           ps1-795: cancelled
           % lpq -Pps1
           ps1 is ready and printing
           Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)      Total Size
           active  robh    796     file2        933028 bytes
           %
       

   If this print job is not yours, you will not have permission to remove it from the print queue using lprm. However, you can use the lpkick command with the -cleartop argument to restart the printer and remove the top job in the queue in the process. For example:

           % lpq -Pps1
           ps1 is ready and printing
           Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)      Total Size
           active  robh    795     file1        978497 bytes
           1st     robh    796     file2        933028 bytes
           % lpkick -cleartop ps1
             ... lots of messages from lpkick here
           % lpq -Pps1
           ps1 is ready and printing
           Rank    Owner   Job     File(s)      Total Size
           active  robh    796     file2        933028 bytes
           %
       

   If you would rather remove all of the print jobs from the printer queue, you can use the -clearq argument to lpkick rather than -cleartop.

6. After clearing the top job or jobs from the queue, if the printer is still not printing you should try one more power-cycle and lpkick. If that fails, then you should report the problem and someone from the systems staff will take a look.

[Return to the FAQ index]