Temporarily route reports around a non-working printer.

Have you ever had a printer run out of toner or break down and wanted to temporarily route new reports to another printer until the affected destination could be attended to or repaired? This can be accomplished very easily in EasySpooler and Rhapsody by taking advantage of the lpsalias file. The lpsalias file is a four field, colon delimited, file with the following field definitions:

Field 1: The lpNN, the printer name or alias.
Field 2: The real printer destination.
Field 3: Any additional options.
Field 4: Any comments.

By creating an lpsalias entry with the lpNN number of the non-working printer in the first field and a new destination lpNN in the second field, all newly generated reports will automatically be routed to the new destination until the lpsalias entry is modified or removed. This all takes place as soon as the lpsalias file is modified and does not require the despooler to even be stopped and restarted.

All reports that were already in the non-working destination’s queue will need to be moved manually to the new destination or will print when the problem with the non-working printer is resolved.

Comments:

Field 1) lpNN represents the destination number, i.e. lp01, lp50, etc.
Field 2) This must be a valid lpNN destination and can not be an alias.
Field 3) This field may be left blank.
Field 4) This field may be left blank.