🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello,

I am having a job wait timeout problem with a couple of PostScript
printers that have serial and AppleTalk interfaces that are in use
simultaneously (Apple LaserWriter IIf and QMS 815).  

Our site has several printers that are accessable to UNIX users via 
their serial ports and smultaneously accessable to Macs via their AppleTalk 
ports.  Normally, the job wait timeout on the printer is the default 30 
seconds.  However, sometimes after printing several mac and UNIX jobs, the 
printer suddenly assumes a job wait timeout time of 300 seconds!  As a result, 
the printer locks onto the serial port for 5 minutes.  UNIX users can
continue to print jobs, but Mac users won't be able to print until
5 minutes *after* the last UNIX job printed.  Does anyone out there
have any thoughts on why the job wait timeout is getting set to 300 
seconds?  It doesn't appear to be manufacturer dependent since both
the Apple and QMS printers behave the same way.

The really frustrating part of this problem is that it doesn't occur
all the time.  It's somewhat intermittent.  I've written a little
postscript program which I can lpr to the printer from the UNIX side
to reset the timeout to 30 seconds:


%!PS-Adobe-2.0 ExitServer
%%Title: Set Time outs
%%EndComments

  serverdict begin 0 exitserver
statusdict begin
 0 60 30 setdefaulttimeouts
end
%EOF


I've had to basically set up a crontab file to fire this code off
about every 5 minutes to ensure that the timeout gets reset to 30
seconds throughout the day.  But this is just a band-aid fix until
I can figure out how to fix the problem permanently.  

I looked at the Postscript header a mac generates and found the following
piece of code:


statusdict begin/waittimeout where{pop waittimeout 300 
lt{statusdict/waittimeout 300 put}if}if end


At first glance, it looks as if the mac might be the culprit, but if the code 
above is effecting the change, why doesn't it change the timeout every 
time the mac prints?  Can anyone help?

Thanks in advance!

Kevin Hansel
hansel@convex.com