IBM Power Ideas Portal


This portal is to open public enhancement requests against IBM Power Systems products, including IBM i. To view all of your ideas submitted to IBM, create and manage groups of Ideas, or create an idea explicitly set to be either visible by all (public) or visible only to you and IBM (private), use the IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com).


Shape the future of IBM!

We invite you to shape the future of IBM, including product roadmaps, by submitting ideas that matter to you the most. Here's how it works:

Search existing ideas

Start by searching and reviewing ideas and requests to enhance a product or service. Take a look at ideas others have posted, and add a comment, vote, or subscribe to updates on them if they matter to you. If you can't find what you are looking for,

Post your ideas

  1. Post an idea.

  2. Get feedback from the IBM team and other customers to refine your idea.

  3. Follow the idea through the IBM Ideas process.


Specific links you will want to bookmark for future use

Welcome to the IBM Ideas Portal (https://www.ibm.com/ideas) - Use this site to find out additional information and details about the IBM Ideas process and statuses.

IBM Unified Ideas Portal (https://ideas.ibm.com) - Use this site to view all of your ideas, create new ideas for any IBM product, or search for ideas across all of IBM.

ideasibm@us.ibm.com - Use this email to suggest enhancements to the Ideas process or request help from IBM for submitting your Ideas.

Add a new idea Subscribe
Status Not under consideration
Workspace AIX
Created by Guest
Created on Mar 11, 2019

RELATED IDEAS

Provide a usable lpstat tool in AIX

In some of our AIX environments we use / want to use printing to remote print servers. For this we configure local print queues. They point to the different print servers, which are sometimes built in interface cards in the printers or external print boxes.

On the server we often need to check the state of the queues. The tool for this is 'lpstat'. lpstat "hangs" very often in some circumstances, e.g. when remote printers are not reachable. This leaves lpstat unusable most of the time, especially in scripts.

Normally lpstat hangs for 90 seconds. We see that lpstat calls rembak, which in its command line can be used with a configurable timeout (-T). The granularity for this timeout is one minute, i.e. the smallest possible timeout is one minute. Unfortunately, when calling lpstat you can't use the -T command line switch, since calling of rembak is obviously hardcoded in lpstat. So we can't set the minimum of one minute when calling lpstat. Preferably the minimum timeout should even be much shorter.

Furthermore and more important, in a new project we want to use Java Print Services (JPS) in WebSphere Application Server on AIX. Printing from the J2EE application within WAS to the mentioned AIX queues normally works very good. But sometimes when printing the JDK calls lpstat for some reason. lpstat then often hangs due to the hang of rembak. This causes the logic in the J2EE application to be interrupted for 90 seconds, waiting for lpstat to return. This is not tolerable in the planned scenario. Therefore this JPS approach isn't usable for us due to the weakness of implementation of lpstat / rembak.

Our request is that IBM provides an lpstat command which is really usable and which doesn't hang in any condition, but instead returns immediately, so it can be safely used by scripts or by JPS. Alternatively, a system-wide configurable timeout for lpstat or rembak (which should be valid for any invocation, e.g. from JPS) with a granularity of one second would solve this problem.

Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Apr 30, 2020

    IBM has evaluated the priority of this enhancement proposal relative to other future product content and determined that this RFE will not be pursued for a future product release

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jan 10, 2020

    as rembak-timeout also affects the time a (large) printjob is allowed to need for printing I would suggest to differ between the timeout rembak uses to contact the remote queue and (if it is reachable) the timeout the actual request to the remote queue is allowed to take in account. Maybe a simple "ping" to the remote device and then fastly aborting if it is not reachable would help!?

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Jun 3, 2019

    .We have recreated the lpstat delay issue locally when the remote printer is down.
    We were able to recreate the delay of 90 seconds and exploring the approaches to fine tune the delay either through a new command line option or an environment variable.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 14, 2019

    1) If the lpstat command is executed over command line do we see the same issue?

    Yes. We can reproduce this hang, when one of the printers is turned off.

    1.1) If it works over command line , then it might be specific to JPS.

    no, not specific to JPS

    2) Is the rembak able to contact printer?

    If the printer is turned off (which could happen, since there would be dozens of printers and some of them might be turned off by users), the printer of course can't be contacted.

    2.1) If rembak was able to contact printer is the printer taking time to respond ?

    n/a

    3) What is the frequency of the issue ( how frequently do we observe this issue)?

    Very often, especially when printers are turned off.

    4) Does this issue occur everytime the printer is down ?

    Yes, we think so. Additionally, we recently had a case, when a printer was turned on and was pingable, but seemed to be in an undefined/hung state. lpstat was hanging then too.

    In our opinion lpstat (if used by other scripts or tools, e.g JPS) should return immediately, independently in which state some of the printers are. For example, 'enq -sAW' works this way.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 9, 2019

    .Can you provide information on the below queries:

    1) If the lpstat command is executed over command line do we see the same issue?

    1.1) If it works over command line , then it might be specific to JPS.

    2) Is the rembak able to contact printer?

    2.1) If rembak was able to contact printer is the printer taking time to respond ?

    3) What is the frequency of the issue ( how frequently do we observe this issue)?

    4) Does this issue occur everytime the printer is down ?

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     May 6, 2019

    .Waiting for the iptraces from the customer to understand the cause for the network glitches. Also parallely exploring the lpstat command.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Apr 26, 2019

    We are exploring if 'rembak' can be modified to take time in secs<60 and need to check if there are any
    other limitations for the existing default '90' seconds. We will update once we have more information.

  • Guest
    Reply
    |     Mar 11, 2019

    For SysV print commands, it is universal to hang when printers are down, not just an AIX thing. The assumption was that everyone would want to know when a printer is non-responsive.

    You may want to add -i to the lpstat commandline to “ignore waiting for a response”, or try lpq or qchk (BSD printing) instead.

By clicking the "Post Comment" or "Submit Idea" button, you are agreeing to the IBM Ideas Portal Terms of Use.
Do not place IBM confidential, company confidential, or personal information into any field.