Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

My opinion about printing on the System i is that it’s as bad as all the other platforms.

I’ve got an interesting problem today which wasn’t that easy to solve.

A customer complained that printing some larger forms were failing to print correctly. Sometimes some pages would not print, but it was highly irregular. Sometimes everything worked fine, and everything printed correctly – but sometimes it failed to print, and the spoolfile was hanging in WRT status.

My first step with debugging such problems is checking this list of common problems. This usually weeds out most of them. However, in this case everything looked alright. The *DEVD was okay, the *PSFCFG was okay, Cumulative PTF and Print Group PTF levels were okay, and no newer PTFs for similar problems were available.

The next step was looking at the job log of the print job. In case you’re wondering how to do that, it’s quite simple:

On this display, just press F17 (which is usually shift-F5). You will then see the regular job display where you can access the job log with option 10.

If you don’t find anything the Joblog, netstat is another great command to have a look at. Have a look at checksum failures in the detail connection display – this can help you tracking down problems related to your lower network layers.

In this particular case, i’ve seen the message PQT3630 in the job log. This message, unfortunately, doesn’t really show you what the problem is – it just lists IPDS sense codes, and not all of them are documented.

There’s an interesting Document from IBM which lists many common sense codes. Mine where not among them.

My cause code was “08210100 DE000001 00000000 D62D0000″. I don’t really know what it means, i wasn’t able to find that. Since the printer in question was old anyway (an InfoPrint 1120), we decided to replace the printer.