hpijs: Excessive log messages if printer connection is down

[Mark Purcell]

From: Michel Messerschmidt <email address hidden>
To: Debian Bug Tracking System <email address hidden>
Subject: hpijs: Excessive log messages if printer connection is down
Date: Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:15:30 +0200

Package: hpijs
Version: 3.9.4b-1
Severity: important

Whenever a print job is processed by cups and the hpijs backend fails
to open the connection to the printer, it writes error messages to
syslog every 30 seconds.
In environments where printers are not always online (e.g. to save
energy) this spams the logfiles without need.

If a printer is turned off while printing, hpijs produces even more
error messages. I had a 20GB /var partition filled completely in 17
hours just by these error messages.

I would have expected such messages to be produced only once for each
print job. And the log priority should be no higher than "warning"
because such failures have no impact on the print spooler.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (990, 'testing'), (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'stable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-1-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages hpijs depends on:
ii cups 1.3.10-2 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) -
ii cups-client 1.3.10-2 Common UNIX Printing System(tm) -
ii cupsddk 1.2.3-5+b1 CUPS Driver Development Kit
ii foomatic-filters 4.0-20090509-1 OpenPrinting printer support - fil
ii ghostscript 8.64~dfsg-1.1 The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF
ii hplip 3.9.4b-1 HP Linux Printing and Imaging Syst
ii libc6 2.9-12 GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii libdbus-1-3 1.2.12-1 simple interprocess messaging syst
ii libgcc1 1:4.4.0-5 GCC support library
ii libjpeg62 6b-14 The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG
ii libsnmp15 5.4.1~dfsg-12 SNMP (Simple Network Management Pr
ii libssl0.9.8 0.9.8k-3 SSL shared libraries
ii libstdc++6 4.4.0-5 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii libusb-0.1-4 2:0.1.12-13 userspace USB programming library

hpijs recommends no packages.

Versions of packages hpijs suggests:
ii hpijs-ppds 3.9.4b-1 HP Linux Printing and Imaging - HP
ii hplip-doc 3.9.4b-1 HP Linux Printing and Imaging - do

-- no debconf information

[David Suffield (david-suffield)]

The hp backend was changed to return an error back to CUPS if the device is no longer available. This means it should only loop if the device returns a valid device-id.

Check the CUPS error policy for the specified printer queue. CUPS can stop-printer, abort-job or retry-job. If the policy is retry-job then this may cause the syslog to fill up.