Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Hello, does anyone have any suggestions for a AIX print queue maintenance application? We have around 500 print queues on our print server and do not want to give direct access to the print server for technicians to reset print queues. Is there a gui tool or something that will provide queue maintenance (disable, enable, etc...)? Or does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to accomplish this? Thanks in advance.

Originally posted by: alethad

I don't know of one that is specifically for print queues. Maybe someone else does.
I use a free web browser tool called Webmin to allow non-unix users to be able to do simple tasks or running scripts without them having to log into the actual system. I have it running on one of my AIX boxes. It's not hard to install. You can control what each user has access to within it and they log into it. The only downside is that it's not interactive. Just straight run a command, script,...etc feeding the variables you need to it. But most of my users that's all they need.

It would be worth looking into.
Good luck.

Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Hi,

In the past we have tried two approaches: a menu driven script, and a web based cgi program. Currently, we are using the menu driven script. The problem we had with this, is that with a large number of printers, at least one will be down, and something like lpstat or enq takes forever to work through the queues. The solution is to use "expect" to check all queues in parallel; not sequentially. This causes other problems with "expect", unless you increase the number of allowed ptys on the system. I would suggest that you write the main script in perl or shell, and only use expect to test the queues.

The other thing that we do is have a root script running from crontabs which checks each host on an hourly basis (office hours only). If it finds problems, then it e-mails the UNIX Support team.

Regards,
Spook