Question on Printer-error

Hey, I want to implement Print-Distributor in our organization and every print job is very important for us. We cannot afford to loose even one. So I was thinking of using Load-Balancing so that I could give an alternate printer if the first printer is out of paper or have any other problems. But from your earlier post, I assume we might still loose the first job that'll be sent to the printer since we do not know unless there's a job in error in the queue. You said enabling snmp could work - but we want to be sure. Is there a way we could write an exception or send mail for the first job that's in error.

There is no way to guarantee you won't loose a page with the Windows spooling system.

However most of the time if a printer is offline then the jobs will queue until it is enabled again.

I have written a blog post about the load balancing at http://www.tonyedgecombe.com/blog/print_distributor_load_balancing which might help you understand how it works.

There are no exceptions generated from unavailable printers.

What if I always want the jobs to print at printer1 but if there's any error (like a job in error status in the queue) - I'd want it to print at printer-2.Reading your Blog on Load-Balancing, it looks like it selects printers sequentially and not always printer-1.

Sri,

It can't do that, it always balances the load.