Printer will not start
Recently Jeff moved a PC and a printer to a different desk, and once everything was hooked back up he couldn't get the AS/400 to recognize the printer. He gets a message that states:
Device PAMPRT1 not available.
The status is 'Vary on pending'. The spool writer, labeled P9 shows the status as 'End'. He's tried starting it, but it keeps saying the device is not available. He can print through the network, so it is attached and the network is seeing the printer, but the AS/400 sees the printer as powered off or not available.
In addition to moving from one desk to another, he also upgraded to a different version of the iSeries Client. He removed the old version, which he believes was 4.2 (or .3) and installed 5.2.
If he emulates a print session, the printer will go active but that does not work for the way they use the printer. Typically someone will have a job waiting on their spool, they will tell it to print to P9(PAMPRT1) and it will go but because the PAMPRT1 is showed powered off/not available.
Does anyone have any idea what's going on or how to fix this?
-- Michelle Davidson, editor, Search400.com
Software/Hardware used:
Software/Hardware used:
ASKED:
September 6, 2005 8:40 AM
UPDATED:
November 9, 2009 6:16 AM
Answer Wiki:
STRPRTWTR DEV(PAMPRT1) OUTQ(P9)
Just making sure that you are specifying the outq.
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<i>If he emulates a print session, the printer will go active...</i>
Then the printer device description is a printer emulation session device description. I <i>think</i> that it's <i>possible</i> that someone manually created the device description in such a way that it ended up with all appropriate attributes to allow it to respond to a printer session startup, but that doesn't matter. However it was created, it's a session device.
In order to use it, start the related printer session. Without the session answering, the device can't vary on and the writer has nothing to talk to.
The session should be configured to start when the PC starts and connects to the AS/400.
Alternatively, create a remote *OUTQ that sends spooled files to a queue on the PC. The PC needs to allow remote systems to send spooled files to it. The queue will be a Windows spool queue that's associated with the printer. The name of the queue might be something like LPT1 and should be visible if you look at the Port assignment in Windows Printers.
The device description doesn't have be varied on in order to use it in programming. It only needs to be varied on if there's an *OUTQ that is sending to the physical device. But you don't have to use that *OUTQ; you can create a different one -- the remote *OUTQ. A remote *OUTQ that sends over TCP/IP isn't necessarily talking to a printer device; it's possible for it to be sending to a remote system (e.g., a PC) that is actually doing the talking to the device.
Tom
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I don’t know if this applies to your situation, but at my previous job, they would change IP addresses on our printers and not tell us, so the device description would then have the wrong IP address on it & had to be changed.