Stopping and Starting All Xi-Text Printers at Once

Xi-TextXi-Textoperationsprinter-statesprinterssphaltspintersplistspstartspstopsreleasesstopssuspend

Every command in the spstart family takes the printer name as a pattern, so one command halts or starts every printer on the host. This article covers the bulk commands, what a spooler restart does to the printers, and the checks a maintenance window needs.

One command covers every printer

sphalt -f '*' halts every printer on the host in one step, and spstart -f '*' starts them again.

Four things follow a bulk stop, and none of them announces itself.

• Stopping the spooler halts every printer, and starting the spooler again leaves them all halted. When the scheduler reloads the saved printer list it forces every entry to halted, whatever state it was in when the spooler stopped. Printers must be started explicitly after every spooler restart.
• A printer that fails to start reports nothing to the command that started it. The printer is brought up by a separate process the scheduler forks, so spstart succeeds and the printer sits in error. The record is in the system report file.
• Starting everything also starts the printers that were already stopped. spstart -f '*' treats halted, offline and error identically, so a printer that was broken before the window comes back indistinguishable from one halted for it. Capture the printer states before stopping anything.
• Every printer with an alignment file is re-armed by the restart and will print its alignment page and wait for an operator at its first job. Somebody has to answer.

Record the printer states first

This is the only record of which printers were working when the window opened.

splist -H > /var/tmp/printers-before.txt

splist lists every printer with its state and needs no privilege. Its default listing is printer name, device, form type, state, job number and job owner. The -H option adds a column header; without it there is no header line.

The format letters are lower case, and only lower-case letters are defined. The ones used below:

Letter	Field
%p	Printer name
%d	Device
%f	Form type
%s	State, with the printer's feedback message appended after a colon for offline and error
%t	State alone, with no feedback message
%j	Number of the job being printed
%u	Owner of that job
%l	Marked local-only

An undefined letter is passed through as a literal character, so a mistyped format produces that letter repeated once per printer, with no error. Check a new format string against one printer first.

splist takes printer names as arguments, and -q takes the same kind of pattern the stop and start commands take, so the listing can be narrowed the same way the action is:

splist -H -q 'inv*,lp[123]'

Using splist as the check on a bulk operation has one catch: splist filters by class code and the stop and start commands do not. splist shows the printers whose class code has a bit in common with the caller's, which on a default installation is every printer, and on a site that partitions printers by class code is a subset. sphalt, spstop and spstart apply no such filter, so they can act on printers the same user's splist output leaves out.

Stopping every printer

The printer name argument is a pattern, so one command covers the whole host.

Halt at end of job (graceful):

sphalt -f '*'

Each printer finishes the job it is on and then stops. A printer that is idle, or waiting for an operator, stops at once.

Stop immediately (abandon the job in progress):

spstop -f '*'

Interrupt (stop now, and release the job for another printer):

spinter -f '*'

Why -f is needed. When a pattern matches more than one printer, the command refuses to act without it:

12 printers fit the description *.
If you mean all of them re-run sphalt with the -f option.

Quote the pattern so the shell passes the asterisk through instead of expanding it against the current directory.

The pattern accepts more than a plain asterisk. It accepts *, ?, a bracketed character range and comma-separated alternatives, and it matches letters without regard to case, so a subset is one command too:

sphalt -f 'inv*,lp[123]'

Which printers a bulk command reaches

Every printer defined on this host, in every state. Printers that are already halted, offline or in error are passed over and counted as done, so the command is safe to repeat and safe to run on a system that has not been surveyed.

Printers owned by another host are excluded. A bare pattern matches local printers only. Another host's printers are addressed by prefixing the host name, and that requires the remote-printer privilege:

sphalt -f 'server2:*'

Without that privilege the command exits with a permission error. On a network of Xi-Text hosts, quieting every printer means running the command once per host.

There is no bulk operation in spq. The printer screen acts on the printer under the cursor, one at a time. Beyond a handful of printers, the command line is the only practical route.

What happens to the job that is printing

Work is preserved in every case. The three commands differ in how much of the job is reprinted.

Command	Job in progress	Where it resumes
sphalt	Finishes normally	Complete; nothing to resume
spstop	Abandoned, and released back into the queue	From the page it had reached, less the printer's configured wind-back
spinter	Abandoned, and released back into the queue	The same, and the printer immediately looks for another job

The page reached is recorded on the job as it prints, page by page, so an abandoned job restarts near where it stopped rather than from page one. It keeps its place in priority order in the queue.

A on the printer screen in spq aborts the printing job and deletes it from the queue. None of the three bulk commands does that.

How much has already been sent to the printer's own buffer is outside Xi-Text's control, so an immediate stop reaches the paper only once that buffer drains.

Starting every printer again

spstart -f '*'

This starts every printer that is halted, offline or in error. The three are treated identically, and error is recovered exactly as offline is. Printers that are already running are left alone, and a pending end-of-job halt on a running printer is cancelled.

Success from spstart means the request was accepted. The scheduler forks a separate process to bring the printer up, and that process is what reads the .device file and the form-type setup file, opens the device and sends the setup string. If any of that fails, the printer goes to error and the reason is written to the system report file. Verify with splist rather than by the exit status:

splist -H -F "%p %s"

For one printer, spstat is a scriptable test that sets the exit status. With no state argument it asks whether the printer is running; with a state name it asks whether the printer is in that state.

spstat lp1          # exit 0 if running, 1 if not
spstat lp1 idle     # exit 0 if idle

Alignment printers stop for an operator at the first job. A printer whose setup file names an alignment file is armed for alignment every time it starts. The alignment page prints when the printer takes its first job, and the printer then waits for approval. Approve or reject from the command line with spok and spnok, or with y and n on the spq printer screen.

Stopping and starting the spooler itself

A software update or a server restart stops the whole spooler rather than the printers individually.

sstop -y

sstop halts every local printer as its first act, and it does so immediately - the same way spstop does, abandoning the jobs in progress rather than letting them finish. It then shuts down the network connections, writes the queue to disk and releases the shared memory. On a busy system with many printers this can take up to five minutes.

Halt gracefully first where the time can be spared. Run sphalt -f '*' and wait for the printers to go quiet before sstop -y, so that the jobs in progress complete instead of being reprinted.

Without -y, sstop prompts for confirmation on standard input, so a script that omits it hangs.

Starting the spooler again:

spstart 2000 50

The two numbers are the initial job and printer allocations. Then start the printers:

spstart -f '*'

A spooler restart clears the printers' running state. Reading the saved printer list sets every entry to halted and clears the pending-halt and alignment flags. The configuration is kept: names, devices, form types, class codes, size limits and descriptions are all held in that saved list.

Suspending scheduling instead of stopping printers

For a short window where the printers themselves are fine, suspending scheduling stops the spooler handing out new work while leaving everything running.

ssuspend -y 3600
srelease

The argument is a number of seconds. srelease takes no arguments and clears the suspension.

Four things follow:

• Without -y it prompts for confirmation, so a script must supply it.
• It suspends the assignment of queued jobs to printers. Users can still submit work with spr; the queue grows.
• Nothing displays that scheduling is suspended. Neither splist nor spq shows it. The symptom is printers sitting idle with jobs queued and no visible reason, which is easily mistaken for a fault.
• It is cleared by a spooler restart, so a suspension left in place ends at the next sstop and spstart cycle.

Give the time as an argument rather than answering the prompt: a value entered at the prompt above two hours is replaced by five minutes, with no message.

Using spq

spq acts on the printer under the cursor, which suits a handful of printers.

1. Press o to switch to the printer section, or start with spq -p to open on it.
2. Move the cursor to a printer.
3. Press h to halt at the end of the current job, or H to stop immediately.
4. Press G to start a stopped printer, or to cancel a pending end-of-job halt.
5. Repeat for each printer - no key acts on all of them.

h is the gentle one and H the abrupt one, which is the reverse of the usual convention.

A maintenance window, start to finish

Every command below works on each platform Xi-Text ships on.

1. Record the starting position, and check the queue for critical jobs with sqlist.

splist -H > /var/tmp/printers-before.txt

2. Stop new work being handed out.

ssuspend -y 3600

3. Halt the printers gracefully and let the jobs in progress finish.

sphalt -f '*'

4. Wait, and check. Repeat until nothing is printing.

splist -H -F "%p %s %j"

5. Do the maintenance. If it requires the spooler down, run sstop -y now and spstart 2000 50 afterwards.

6. Start the printers. Required after a spooler restart, and harmless if the spooler stayed up.

spstart -f '*'

7. Compare against the record and investigate anything that differs.

splist -H

8. Release scheduling.

srelease

9. Watch the first few jobs through, and answer the alignment prompt on any printer that uses one.

Stopping everything now

To stop everything now, accepting that the jobs in progress will be reprinted:

spstop -f '*'

The jobs return to the queue, so restarting is spstart -f '*' and the work resumes near where it stopped. Where the printers must stop but the queue must not drain into them afterwards, run ssuspend -y 3600 before starting them again.

Starting at boot

On a packaged installation the spooler is a system service. The installed unit is:

[Unit]
Description=Xi-Text Print Manager
After=syslog.service
StartLimitIntervalSec=30
StartLimitBurst=5

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/spstart 2000 50
ExecStop=/usr/local/bin/sstop -y
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=5
Type=forking
TimeoutStopSec=330
KillMode=mixed

[Install]
WantedBy=printer.target

TimeoutStopSec=330 covers a graceful stop, which halts every printer, syncs the spool and only then releases the shared memory; under load that exceeds the 90-second default, and a shutdown killed part-way leaves shared-memory segments behind. Some installation routes write a shorter unit without that setting, and no route replaces an existing unit file on upgrade, so check the unit on an existing installation before restarting a busy system.

The unit starts the spooler. It leaves the printers halted, so spstart -f '*' belongs in the site's own startup arrangements after it. The commands are installed in /usr/local/bin.

Watching the states during a bulk operation

Watch the states from a second terminal:

splist -H -F "%p %s %j"

Run it repeatedly with whatever the platform provides. The watch command is absent on the commercial Unix platforms, so a portable loop is:

while true
do
    splist -H -F "%p %s %j"
    sleep 5
done

To count printers by state:

splist -F "%s" | sort | uniq -c

To list the ones still running:

splist -F "%p %t" | grep -v halted

Privileges

Starting and stopping printers is an ordinary user's action. spstart, sphalt, spstop and spinter require the halt/go privilege, which is in the default privilege set, so most users can run a bulk halt. Approving alignment with spok and spnok requires the printer-queue privilege, also a default. Stopping the spooler with sstop, ssuspend or srelease requires the spooler-stop privilege, which is absent from the default set - root and the system user are accepted as well. Acting on another host's printers requires the remote-printer privilege. splist and spstat require none.

Two consequences follow: an ordinary user can halt every printer on the host with one command, and the operator who has to run sstop during the window may need a privilege they do not normally hold.

When something will not stop or start

A printer will not stop. If sphalt leaves it running, it is waiting for the job in progress to finish, which is a long time on a large job or a slow device. spstop ends it now. A printer stuck in shutdown is waiting for the device to accept the closing strings - commonly XOFF flow control from a printer that is out of paper or switched offline.

A printer will not start. The reason is in the system report file, which lives in the spool directory:

tail -50 /var/spool/xi/spd/spshed_reps

The usual causes are a parse error in the printer's setup file, a device that is neither a character device nor a FIFO, an alignment file that cannot be read, and a mismatch between a network device and its filter. A printer's setup files are in its own directory under the printers directory:

ls -l /var/spool/xi/printers/lp1/

The paths on a given installation may differ. Both directories are settings in the master configuration file /etc/xi/textconfig - SPOOLDIR and SPOOLPT - and the values above are the compiled-in defaults a packaged installation uses.

Printers are idle with jobs queued. Check whether scheduling is suspended (nothing displays it, so run srelease if in doubt), then check the job's form type against the printer's, the job's class code, the job's hold time, and the printer's size limits.

A permission error. See Privileges above; the message names the operation that was refused.

Quick reference

Command	Effect
splist -H	List every printer, with a header
sphalt -f '*'	Halt every local printer at the end of its current job
spstop -f '*'	Stop every local printer now; jobs return to the queue
spinter -f '*'	Interrupt every local printer; jobs return to the queue
spstart -f '*'	Start every local printer that is halted, offline or in error
spstat \	Exit 0 if that printer is running
ssuspend -y \	Stop handing queued jobs to printers
srelease	Resume handing out jobs
sstop -y	Stop the spooler; halts every printer immediately first
spstart 2000 50	Start the spooler; leaves every printer halted

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