Submitting jobs to the spooler causes no discernible spooler activity. Assume a local ASCII print queue named asc.
Is the qdaemon running?
Issue the command enq -Pasc /etc/motd. If the qdaemon is not active, a variant of the following message will be displayed:
enq: (WARNING): Cannot awaken qdaemon. (request accepted anyway)
enq: errno = 2: No such file or directory
enq: (WARNING): Cannot awaken qdaemon. (request accepted anyway)
enq: errno = 2: No such file or directory
Use the command ps -ef | grep qdaemon to verify that the qdaemon is not active. If the qdaemon is not active, you should see, at the most, a line of output representing the grep itself. It should look something like this:
root 2992 18792 0 12:46:39 pts/2 0:00 grep qdaemon
If the qdaemon is active, which it almost certainly will not be, you will see a variant of the following line:
root 2980 3652 0 12:41:25 - 0:00 /usr/sbin/qdaemon
If the qdaemon is not active, issue the command startsrc -s qdaemon to restart the qdaemon. If the qdaemon died, it should have been restarted automatically by the srcmstr process, but it doesn't always work, so restart it manually. You should see a variant of this message:
0513-059 The qdaemon Subsystem has been started. Subsystem PID is 3000.
Wait a minute or so and re-issue the command ps -ef | grep qdaemon. Is the qdaemon still active or did it start and then quit?
The qdaemon may no longer be active, despite the fact that you just restarted it and received a message stating the qdaemon's process id (PID). Check for the existence of the file named /var/spool/lpd/stat/pid. You can do this by issuing the command cat /var/spool/lpd/stat/pid. This file contains the PID of an active qdaemon. When the qdaemon is not active, the file is supposed to be removed.
If the cat command prints a number on your display, that should be the pid of an active qdaemon. If you have already determined that the qdaemon is not active, remove the file /var/spool/lpd/stat/pid because a previous instance of the qdaemon somehow quit without causing this file to be removed. If the file does not exist, you should see a message like:
cat: cannot open /var/spool/lpd/stat/pid
The qdaemon was inactive, you restarted it, it quit again, the file /var/spool/lpd/stat/pid existed, and you removed that file. Restart the qdaemon again using the command startsrc -s qdaemon. Wait a minute or so and issue the command ps -ef | grep qdaemon again to see if the qdaemon remained active. You can also issue the command cat /var/spool/lpd/stat/pid again to see if the file was re-created and now contains a valid PID.
If the answer to the original question, Is the qdaemon running?, was yes, it is, then it is possible that the qdaemon is waiting on all currently running jobs to complete before it shows any signs of accepting new jobs. This scenario often occurs when a machine running the base operating system has a large number of printers (more than 25) attached to asynchronous adapters, such as 64-port or 128-port adapters.
To check to see if the qdaemon is waiting on a job to complete before it runs any more jobs, use the lpstat command to see if any jobs have a status of RUNNING. If so, physically examine the printers that show RUNNING jobs and verify that at least one job is actually running. If one or more printers are showing DEV_WAIT because of paper jams or because they are out of paper, fix the problem and see if the printers begin printing. If they do not begin printing, again use the lpstat command to see if the queue status is RUNNING. In any of these circumstances, the purpose of checking the printers is to verify that at least one printer is actually printing even though the qdaemon is not starting new jobs.
Now submit a new job to the spooler with the command enq -Pasc /etc/motd.
Use the lpstat command to examine the queue status. If the new job has a job number of NEW, then the qdaemon is, for some reason, focused on running other jobs and will not start any new jobs until the current jobs are complete. You can only wait. You can not even cancel the jobs that are running Job cancellation requests are jobs as well, and the qdaemon is not taking new jobs.