I've been banging on our student printing infrastructure for a few days now trying to get a handle on the kinks we've been experiencing. While I was doing this yesterday I came across an oddity.
One one printer-pool, we had 10 jobs queued up. One of the printers was having paper-jams all day, so the other printer was having to handle the load. I look at the printer in question and I get:
Dur? I check the queue itself to see what, pray, that could be. I find a job sized about 5.2MB, with 5 pages. Quick math tells me that should result in 250 pages, and would really explain why there was a backup in the queue. Such jobs should never hit printer since we set our PCounter to drop jobs with more than 50 pages in 'em. Unfortunately, the job clears before I can grab the spool-file. PCounter records exactly 1 page as printed. One?? HOW!
Since the pcounter log recorded the URL of the PDF involved I knew the original document to use. So I headed to that particular computer lab early this morning and grab the same workstation to see if I can reproduce this fun feature. No go. No matter what permuation of driver and driver-settings, the NDPS queue correctly identifies how many pages are emerging. The only thing I can think of is that it was set to print four-up, duplex for the first eight pages of the document. That would create a spool file about the right size. But the copy 40 of 50 thing still throws me. That sort of thing IN GENERAL is supposed to be frowned upon. Also unfortunately, the PCounter logs for that printer before this job went through show no obvious big stuff.
So either someone has figured out a way to print off way too many jobs and defeat our accounting, or the status reported was really old somehow. Most odd.
One one printer-pool, we had 10 jobs queued up. One of the printers was having paper-jams all day, so the other printer was having to handle the load. I look at the printer in question and I get:
COPY 40 OF 50
Dur? I check the queue itself to see what, pray, that could be. I find a job sized about 5.2MB, with 5 pages. Quick math tells me that should result in 250 pages, and would really explain why there was a backup in the queue. Such jobs should never hit printer since we set our PCounter to drop jobs with more than 50 pages in 'em. Unfortunately, the job clears before I can grab the spool-file. PCounter records exactly 1 page as printed. One?? HOW!
Since the pcounter log recorded the URL of the PDF involved I knew the original document to use. So I headed to that particular computer lab early this morning and grab the same workstation to see if I can reproduce this fun feature. No go. No matter what permuation of driver and driver-settings, the NDPS queue correctly identifies how many pages are emerging. The only thing I can think of is that it was set to print four-up, duplex for the first eight pages of the document. That would create a spool file about the right size. But the copy 40 of 50 thing still throws me. That sort of thing IN GENERAL is supposed to be frowned upon. Also unfortunately, the PCounter logs for that printer before this job went through show no obvious big stuff.
So either someone has figured out a way to print off way too many jobs and defeat our accounting, or the status reported was really old somehow. Most odd.