error 288

[Sam Nehama]

Hello,

I have a customer that is receiving an error 288 when trying to print.  The error occurs infrequently - perhaps once every 2 weeks or so.  Their server is running version 8.32, and their Windx clients (standalone) are also at 8.32.  I've seen this before if the server/Windx client are at different versions, but never when they are at the same version.  Thoughts?

Thanks,
Sam

[James Zukowski]

Per the documentation:

Error #256 (and >256)

Operating System Errors

Any error message over 255 is a reported operating system error. PxPlus reports OS errors by taking the actual OS error number and adding 256.

Use the following requests to determine what these errors are:

    PRINT MSG(error#) or PRINT MSG(RET)

When I print msg(288), I get "Broken pipe".

[Sam Nehama]

yes, I'm getting the broken pipe message as well...but what does it mean? and why is it occurring (and not all the time)?

[Mike King]

If this is occurring printing, its likely your printer is defined as a pipe directly to the device.  As to why the pipe might break would depend on your setup but it could be due to a printer connection error or some other event.

Assuming you are running on a Linux platform, you might consider printing to a file then passing the file to the system spooler using the 'lpr' command with the '-r' option to delete the file once printed.  This should avoid any potential broken pipe.

[Jim Morton]

I recently ran into an intermittent err 288 issue printing on a Linux server when the report took a very long time to run. Turned out that CUPS was closing the printer due to an inactivity setting. When Pxplus tried to print to the channel it got the 288 broken pipe error. I believe CUPS was set at a default timeout of 300 seconds (5 minutes.) The solution (in my case) was to edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and add
Timeout 1800
to change it to 30 minutes.

[Sam Nehama]

Thanks, Jim.  I will implement this.