Documentation: Operations

phpPrintAdmin is a web application for administrating Linux print servers. You can use any web browser for viewing it, such as Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator.

Point your browser to http://atlas/pa to view phpPrintAdmin.

You will be prompted for a username and password. Enter:

Username: operator
Password: <password>

to gain operator access to phpPrintAdmin. Please note that "operator" is case-sensitive – don't use capital letters.

As a operator user, you will be able to view the status of jobs and printing, but not make any modifications.
While the phpPrintAdmin print servers do provide Windows printing services, this feature is particularly useful to monitor jobs being printed/plotted from your Unix workstation, or via Zeh, which use Unix printing services.

Contents:

• Printing Overview
• Jobs/Queues
      - job status -
      - printer status -
• Printers
      - view printers database -

Printing Overview

In a networked environment, there are a few points through which a job passes.

1) First, you create the job on your workstation and send it to the print server.  This might be done with a "print" command in an application, with the "lpr" command, or via Zeh.

2) The print server places the job in the appropriate printer queue, which is essentially a holding place for jobs to wait as jobs ahead of them finish.  Additionally, there may be some filtering applied to the print job to make it printable by a certain printer.

3) When the job in the queue is the "first in line", the job is spooled through to the printer itself.

Summary:

client sends job ->  server puts jobs in queue -> job is sent to printer.

phpPrintAdmin monitors the status of jobs in queues, and also the printers the queues are printing to.

Home Page for phpPrintAdmin
The initial page for phpPrintAdmin simply shows the status of the servers in the phpPrintAdmin system. Additionally, it may show important messages about printing should there be any.
From here, there are three options to choose from as a operator user, two being under the menu topic of "Jobs/Queues", and one under the topic of "Printers". What follows is an explanation of each feature.

Jobs/Queues
- job status –
This allows users to view the current status of jobs that are printing. Please note that this only covers servers in the phpPrintAdmin system – job status on the servers IMSONPS1, IMSONPS2, etc. will not be displayed. Since these servers are exclusively Windows print servers, though, information on jobs on these servers can be obtained via your Windows workstation. Please contact the help desk for information on how to check the status of Windows print jobs on these servers.
When you click on "job status", the print servers in the phpPrintAdmin system are queried about what printers they currently have jobs for, and a list is displayed of all print queues that currently contain jobs. Additionally, the printer the queue is intended to print to is queried about its status, which is useful if you want to see if your job is actually printing/plotting. If a plotter or printer is out of paper, off line, etc, a message will be displayed announcing the fact.

Something like this might be displayed:

Job Control

Select a printer to control jobs on....

Server name: atlas
Nothing to display
Server name: hernprint
 

Server name: calprint
Nothing to display
 

You can select one of the queues/printers displayed to get a detailed view of its status. Click on the radiobutton for the corresponding printer, and click "submit query".

(continued next page)

Something like the following will be returned to the browser:
 

Job Control

Queue details for printer h0100-4500@hernprint

Queue status: okay general status of queue
Printer status: idle general status of printer

Queue: printing status: disabled if disabled, jobs will be accepted but not printed
Queue: spooling status: enabled if disabled, jobs will not be accepted
Number of jobs: 1

Jobs: (listing of jobs in queue)

job_rank: shows order of job in queue. Lowest number is next one to be printed, and up from there. Other possible messages are "active" (if a job is currently being printed), "stalled" (if a job is trying to be printed but cannot for some reason), or "error" (if a job has encountered some error while trying to print).
owner: the unix user ID that "owns" (hence, printed and has control) of the print job.
orig_host: The host that the job originated from (the client's workstation)
job_id: an automatically generated ID code for the job – useful for deleting jobs manually
files: the names of the file(s)
size: size of file(s) submitted
time: time job was submitted

Status History (last 5 messages): (status messages from server relevant to this queue)
done job 'root@localhost+651' transfer to h0100-4m@localhost at 12:46:42.943
subserver pid 21816 exit status 'JSUCC' at 12:46:42.946
h0100-4500@localhost.localdomain: job 'root@localhost+651' moved at 12:46:42.946
job 'root@localhost+651' removed at 12:46:42.946
waiting for subserver to exit at 12:46:58.328
 

Jobs/Queues
 - printer status –
This feature will allows the user to query any printer on the network about its status. Possible status messages would be if a plotter is "ready to plot", or "out of paper", or if a printer was "idle" (not doing anything, and ready to accept jobs).

An example use of this would be to verify that a plotter was ready to accept a large job ahead of time.
 

To use this feature, just type in the name of the printer in the text field, and press submit. The default information to return is the printer's status.  Additionally, if for some reason you wish to verify the model of printer, check the appropriate box.

Printers
- view printers database –

This feature allows a user to query the phpPrintAdmin database about what printers it is storing information about. Please note the distinction here: this section is querying a database, not an actual printer.  The database is accurate, though - it forms the basis from which configuration files for the print servers are generated.

 The first screen asks the user to create a list of printers to select from by giving some criteria on what printer(s) to display. For example, if you wanted to view the entry for the printer n0212-5si, you could enter a string like "212-5si", and the printer n0212-5si would be displayed in a list, possibly with others matching the same criteria. The search string can be applied to search for the name, ip address, or model of the printer. Additionally, the list can be filtered by which server the print queue resides on to further narrow results.

The large table below allows the user to choose what kinds of information they want to view about the printer. If no boxes are checked, a default list of information will be displayed.
 

Here's an example of this: I want to print to the printer n0212-5si, and use 2-sided printing if possible (I'm not sure if the printer supports 2-sided printing). I would use the "view printers database", using "212-5si" as my search criteria. I would check the following box: option_Duplexer. Here's the results I would get:
 

View Printers

The option_Duplexer column reports a "Yes" for the printer named n0212-5si, so, yes, the printer supports duplexing.



That's it! Please send questions, comments, and (most importantly) bugs to
tom.klopf@mms.gov