[Info-vax] The PWAIT tool.

[Steven Underwood]

"Jan-Erik Söderholm" <jan-erik.soderholm at telia.com> wrote in message 
news:uYGxm.11985$U5.164697 at newsb.telia.net...
> A short Saturday morning update...
>
> Thank's to all that contributed to this thread.
>
> Now, today (Saturday) I thought I'd try some of the
> last sugestions for SDA commands, but the MWAIT process
> is now gone. Something have got it to finish of by it
> self. Just a few notes...
>
> The process was a running a DCPS symbiont and setup
> using "IP_LPD/<ip-address>".
>
> I guess that all this started when the printer itself
> for some reason was unaccessable for a moment. In
> OPERATOR.LOG I can see a some "%DCPS-I-PRINTERSTALLED"
> messages and then a number of "%DCPS-F-CONTERMINATED"
> which probably comes from my routines to /stop/reset
> and /start queues that are hanging in a "starting"
> state (which seems to happens with some printers that
> has gone into a "power-save" mode and DCPS can not
> get it to wake up if I do not run a stop/start sequence
> on the queue, but that it something else and usualy do
> not get the symbiont to hang).
>
> So, *something* on the net or in the printer got the
> symbiont into this MWAIT state, and *somthing* (else?)
> got it out of this sometimes between Thuseday evening
> and saturday morning. I can see that the entries that
> has been pending since two days back was printed from
> 05:00 saturday morning (that is the time when my queue
> stop/start routine starts again after the night pause).
>
> Well, since there is no process to look at anymore, there
> isn't anything else then to close this case for the time
> beeing.
>
> This happens aprox once every 6 months so it's not a big
> deal. And we will in a few weeks upgrade VMS 8.2 -> 8.3
> and TCPIP 5.5 -> 5.6, so there is no reason to dig deaper
> at the moment.
>
> Thanks all...
>
> Jan-Erik.
>

When I started my current job, one my first days there we had a similar 
issue with a hung printer.  I developed the following procedure to clear the 
printer and get it back running and then found out that it happens a couple 
times a year and their procedure was to delete the queue manager and 
recreate all the queues.

---
I had an issue where a file hung up the HP9050$LASER print queue and when I 
was trying to restart it, it was calling out an error with SYMBIONT_xxx (I 
had thrown out my documentation before I knew it was a recurring problem).

I fixed it by using

$ show system/proc=symbiont*

to find the PID of the failing service, then

$ show process/continuous/id=PID

To see what that process was doing.  I found it was running 
$1$DIA0:[SYS1.SYSCOMMON.][SYSEXE]DCPS$SMB.EXE;1  I saw that several of the 
other SYMBIONT_xxx processes were also running DCPS$SMB.EXE, so I killed 
just the offending process by

$ stop/id=PID

I then restarted the print queue and a new SYBIONT_xxx process was created 
and the queue worked fine.

If the error message does not show the SYMBIONT_ID, there is a logical that 
shows which process is associated with which print queue.

$ show logical DCPS*PID