Why is BP Forms Not Printing?

Cause #1 -- The Printer

The printer is unplugged, out of paper or is off -line or in an error condition.  Use the CUPS printer page (web page) or the console of the Linux Open Office print server to examine the printer status.  Run a test page to the printer from the printer utility.  See Managing Printers and Jobs

Cause #2 -- Phantom Not Running

If you are using the BP Forms phantom to queue documents, then check to ensure that your BP Forms phantom threads are running.  You can do this by logging to your BPIFORMS account and running the bpi.form.phantom.menu command.  A list of phantom threads will be presented and each one should have a numeric value in the 'pid' column.  If they do not, then the phantom is not running and you must start it.

Cause #3 -- bpi_forms share has become dismounted

The BP Forms server (the linux print server) must mount a directory that resides on your multiValue host in order to function.  The directory is normally mounted but extraordinary events such as a server crash, power outage or network failure could have caused the directory to become dismounted.  To remount, you can simply restart the BP Forms linux server or you can login to it with root privileges and type mount -a to force a re-mount.

You can know if the directory has become unmounted by examining the log of a running phantom.  As the phantom tries to process a document, it will verify the mount of the directory.  If the directory has become dismounted, then the phantom will write an appropriate message into the phantom's log indicating that the mount is not available.

Cause #4 -- Phantom has become stuck

If the pid column in bpi.form.phantom.menu is showing a numeric value, check the In_Que column.  This column shows the number of documents waiting in queue to be processed.  If this column does not show a number, then the problem is likely that your program is not creating the document.  You should turn up verbosity in your print program and closely examine the messages to spot any errors in your code.  Phantoms getting stuck is an extremely rare situation.  If the problem persists, kill the phantom then increase the verbosity of the phantom thread and restart it.  Check the logs for messages that may reveal the issue.

Cause #5 -- Print Server has run out of disk

While BP Forms is designed to not store documents or data on the print server, the print server runs on Linux and uses Open Office / Libre Office.  The operating system or Open Office/Libre Office may create files related to job history, logs, core dumps, updates, etc.  As part of your normal system administration, you would periodically check the BP forms server to see if there are any concerning entries in your logs files and to verify that you have sufficient disk space, etc.  

You can quickly check the disk consumption on the print server by:

  • Go to the Blue Prairie Forms admin menu (bpi.form.phantom.menu)
  • Select a thread associated with the print server
  • Press $
    • This will log you into the print server
  • Type df at the $ prompt
  • Review the local file systems (especially /) and make sure that none are more that 95%  (we recommend that no file system be more than 85% full)

If you find that a file system is more than 95% full, you may:

  • Review the file system to find any old, un-necessary files and remove them
  • Add more disk