Author: paul.deluca

Where can I find the Eclipse redbook for Linux?

The hard- and soft-copy redbooks that were previously provided by Eclipse Support have been retired and replaced by the articles contained in this Knowledge Base. If you are new to the Eclipse platform, here is a brief overview of the articles you may find helpful. Please use the search functionality to locate additional articles, or submit a request for additional content you believe other users may find useful.

Hardware

Systems Administration

Backup

Printing

Storage Management

User Management

Faxing

Are there any CUPS settings that I can change to keep my Linux print queues from going down?

The default CUPS (Linux print spooler) settings have been shown to be reliable for Eclipse legacy printing at over 100 customer locations. In nearly all instances where print queues are consistently “going down,” a wide area network (WAN) issue has been proven to be the root cause. While working to resolve long-term networking issues, here are a few useful settings that can be adjusted to increase the amount of time allowed by CUPS before disabling a print queue

Timeout

The Timeout directive controls the amount of time CUPS will wait before an active HTTP or IPP request times out. The default timeout is 300 seconds (5 minutes), but this can be increased by modifying the /etc/cups/cupsd.conf configuration file, per the example below (1200 seconds or 20 minutes):

Timeout 1200

Maximum Job Limit

The MaxJobs directive controls the maximum number of jobs that are kept in memory. Once the number of jobs reaches the limit, the oldest completed job is automatically purged from the system to make room for the new one. If all of the known jobs are still pending or active then the new job will be rejected.

In a real-world scenario, if there is a printer down with a very large number of jobs in its queue this setting could cause printing to stop functioning server-wide. For this reason, and to ensure there are no hidden hardware or network issues, it is important to periodically monitor the number of jobs in the print queues (using the lpstat or similar tools).

If you regularly submit more than a few hundred jobs at one time to a print queue, you may wish to increase this setting in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf, taking care not to raise it too high to avoid system crash or spooler filesystem from filling up from an out of control print job.

By default, CUPS limits the number of active jobs at any one time to 500, but this can be increased to a larger value or be disabled entirely by setting the value in /etc/cups/cupsd.conf to 0 per the example below:

MaxJobs 0

Resources

http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-1.3/ref-cupsd-conf.html

Why can’t I do X from within Eclipse anymore?

In general, system administration functions that aren’t a core part of Eclipse (such as printer management, backup monitoring, etc.) are being gradually phased out of Eclipse. This is in line with best practices in the software industry. By utilizing the proper 3rd party software for managing functions outside of Eclipse, Eclipse is able to reduce the amount of development hours spent maintaining duplicate functionality, and we can focus our development efforts on the wholesale distribution software.

We understand that our customers’ goal is to reduce downtime and increase the availability of the Eclipse software and its companion products, so our goal is to provide our customers’ system administrators with the best possible tools for each task. Often times, these are not Eclipse’ but rather vendor tools (Red Hat, CUPS, CrashPlan, VSIFAX, etc.). This is the drive behind our recent efforts to provide our customers with additional documentation and training, available through our Knowledge Base and Education department. We want our customers’ system administrators to be familiar with using the same administration tools that our Systems support team uses on a day to day basis.

VSI-FAX Failure Codes

If you are experiencing troubles with outbound faxing, please refer to this table of the most common errors:

  • NODIAL: This means that the modem doesn’t “hear” a dial-tone. Hook an analog phone up to the modem’s fax line and make sure that you can place outgoing long-distance and local calls.
  • LINDRP or TMEOUT: These indicate that the fax started to go through, but couldn’t finish for some reason. You may also receive reports from your recipients of duplicate cover pages, garbles faxes and other similar symptoms. The first thing to check is that you’re using a modem on the recommended hardware list, because outdated modems typically have problems sending to newer fax hardware. If you are using a recommended modem, you should call your phone company and long-distance providers to have them check the line quality.

For more detail on the various fax status codes, please see Esker’s VSI-FAX Reference Addendum.

What are the Eclipse samba shares used for?

The Eclipse application uses the following samba shares to transfer files between Windows servers:

  • msg-out: this share is used to provide print jobs to the Eclipse Forms server
  • msg-in: this optional share can be used to deliver files to Eclipse from external data sources
  • CONV.DATA: this optional share is used by the data conversion tools when migrating data between ERP solutions
  • exports: this optional share is used by the “Windows Direct” companion product to allow users the ability to download access their reports from a mapped network drive