On Sun, 12 Mar 1995 10:51:37 +0100 Goetz Neumann said:
>John wrote:
>>  We came in this morning and found an active spoolfile on one of
>>  our remote Laserjet IVsi printers.  The Operator tried a few
>>  commands such as suspending spooling for the device.  She was
>>  unable to affect the situation.  For what ever reason, she did a
>>  stopspool on the device next.  SCREEEETTTHHH!
 
>this looks similar to a complete system hang, that I had
>to analyse a while ago.
>Basically it has to do with the spooler getting too many
>user commands queued at its message port, while it cannot
>proceed with IO to an offline device. An ABORTIO <ldev>
>will probably also cleanup the situation.
 
This sounds similar to a problem I'm having on X.50.24 (PowerPatch Pull).
There's a batch job that monitors a set of :REFUSEd terminals to run an
application on them (redirecting $stdin/$stdlist).  If a terminal is not
powered up (now) it hangs on that port.  These are direct-connect ports
too, so no modem nonsense is at play.  The father process does FOPEN the
port and transmit some terminal initialization strings beforehand, and
that locks up the whole mess.
 
[\] Jeff