November 2006 Archives

A few people have reported that they are unable to create a print queue for the HH-303 HPLJ 4345 in Windows XP: the Add Printer application hangs just after one selects make and model. If this happens, try using the following as the address for the network queue instead of the one given in the documentation:

http://print.math.mcmaster.ca:631/printers/HH303lj4345

The HH-303 HPLJ 4345 printer is working again and the queues have been redirected back from the HH-403 printer.

The firmware has been upgraded and I am told that this should help. We shall see.

Mathserv was rebooted at 11:45 am today after it became unresponsive following some fifteen minutes of very high sustained network load. The server and services (email, Web, home directories, printing) were unavailable for ca. six minutes. Email will have been queued for delivery and most msprime workstations should have become responsive again when mathserv came back up.

I will be reviewing the logs to determine the source of the problem.

The HPLJ 4345 outside of HH-303 is down; all print jobs are being re-routed to the HH-403 printer. A service call has been placed but I wouldn't count on the printer being back uyp before some time on Monday.

Please be aware that when you send a request for n copies of a job to the HPLJ 4000-series printers (in HH-214, HH-303 and HH-403) from an OS X or linux computer, you will get n^2 copies: i.e. you can get the printer to print only 1, 4, 9, 16, etc. copies and you will have to ask for the square root of that number. We don't have a solution yet.

As announced in October, the department is going to be charging for printouts to the shared printers. Seriously. See the printing guidelines for thresholds and rates.

Other recent printing news...

A few people have had problems with the settings of their desktop manager (i.e. KDE, Gnome, WindowMaker) after upgrading their systems to Mandriva 2006.0. The quickest solution is to reset your desktop-manager settings to the default.

The msprime workstations - i.e. the Dell GX270 linux workstations used by graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and some faculty members - have been running Mandrake Linux 10.1 for two years now. Mandriva Linux 2006.0 has been deployed and tested on a dozen or so systems for several weeks and is now ready for general deployment.

When you next reboot your workstation, it should come up running Mandriva 2006.0. If you find that any applications are misssing, please send email to sysadmin@math.mcmaster.ca.

Yes, it's been a bad couple of days for spam. Updating the spamassassin database will help to some degree, but we're considering other options for the near (but not immediate) future.

If you've not activated the spam filter for your Math & Stats account, you really should do so. Even on a bad spam day like yesterday when I got 40 spam messages in my mailbox, more than 600 were caught by SpamAssassin.

You can help the spam filter by training with spam that it missed.

R 2.4.0 has been installed on bayes and the Mandriva 2006.0 msprime hosts. You can run R with the commands R-2.4.0, R-2.3.1, and R; R will continue to run 2.3.1 for the next week or so.

The HPLJ 4345 outside of HH-303 does not have a Cancel button as most other HP printers do. Simply press the Stop button in order to cancel the current print job.

The new HPLJ 4345 outside of HH-303 occasionally complains that a print job requires paper of a particular size and no amount of button pushing alone will force it to print from the normal Letter size in trays 2 and 3. You can usually get the job to print by simply press the Start button twice (wait a few seconds before pressing it the second time). If that doesn't work, putting paper in tray 1 (the drop-down tray on the right-hand side of the printer) and pressing the Start button should.

This printer seems to ask for special paper far more often than the old HPLJ 4300 did; I do not yet know why.

Mathserv was inaccessible this morning from 8:20 am to 9:00 am due to a network problem; web, email and workstation access were all down during this period. All mail was queued for later delivery and workstations will have started working again without reboots once mathserv was back on the network.

Note that we know the source of the problem (which caused a failure in the Summer, too) and have been waiting on hardware replacement; the new hardware arrived this week and will be deployed soon.

If you try to print multiple copies of a document from OS X to the HPLJ 4545 outside of HH-303, you're likely to find that you'll get dozens of copies. This doesn't happen from either Windows XP or linux. Using the latest driver makes no difference. For now, don't try to print multiple copies to the HH-303 printer.