SYSTEM MANAGEMENT - SPOOL QUEUES

SYSTEM MANAGEMENT - SPOOL QUEUES
Location

System Manager – Housekeeping – Spooler Management – Spool Queue

Purpose

To inspect a list of the reports produced with the application.

Print or reprint a job.

Find out if printing has finished.

Delete a print job from the spool queue.

Why Maintain?

If the spool queue is not maintained it will grow and take up unnecessary disk space. This can cause the spooler to stop or the system to slow down. Also the location of held reports within a large spool queue is difficult and time consuming.

HOW TO MAINTAIN

System Administrator

The system administrator can go through the spool queue and look for old reports on the status below.

(Note – with the report highlighted, pressing F4 twice will show the date that the report was last run, and last printed.)

Status E – ERROR, this may occur when a job is stopped, after the job has shown status killed. It may also occur if the printer is jammed, or off-line, or if the job has been sent to the wrong device.

Reports also error if there is no data in the report.

Highlighting the print job title and then pressing F2 will give more information about the cause of the problem.

Status I – INCOMPLETE, reports are on status incomplete when the report program has temporarily interrupted production of the report, for example, if the client crashed when running the report or the user has terminated their session during running the report.

Status S – SPOOLING, this is the status when a report is being run so be careful not to delete current reports. However if the server crashed or was shutdown while running reports the report would still have this status.

Status W – WAITING, these are reports that are waiting to print. However there may be reports in the queue which have been sent to a paper without a printer assigned to it. In such a case the reports will remain in the queue on waiting status for ever unless they are cleared down.

Users

The users may be required to perform the majority of the housekeeping actions for the reports they have generated. When a user goes into spool manager they can only see the items in the spool queue under their name, and can only manage the items they can see.

Note

The spool queue is at the bottom of many of the report menu’s, but can be placed on a users menu without the need for that user to have manager status.

How Often?

It is a good idea to perform this task on a regular basis, either weekly, or as a minimum on a monthly basis.