How does or what makes a printer go into a disabled state?

There is a command called "disable" that does it. Sometimes the interface script will call disable if it detects an error.

I guess i'm trying to figure out what the errors could be. Is it that the printer becomes unavailable for a period of time? The printer sends back a failure code? I have a hp-ux system that has a lot (500+) queues and every day there are a couple that go into disabled state and start working after enable.

Is there a limit to the number of printers I can define?

You would need to study the interface script to see why it decided to disable the printer.

A decently written interface script will use the -r option on disable and supply a useful reason. You can see these with "lpstat -p". Have you tried that?

We have similar problems with our HP boxes and have never figured it out. Just out of curiosity, how are your queues configured? We are sending to JetDirect cards on various HP printers. I've seen similar problems while doing some consulting gigs and even worked with HP support at one point and we were never able to figure out why it happened even after sending all sorts of logs to HP after several occurances. Nothing ever seems to be wrong with the physical printer, no jams, it's not out of paper, memory usage is fine, etc.

Most are to jetdirect some are to other printservers (Xerox, Axis...) but it doesn't seem to be to one specific printserver. Thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one.
This is a minor inconvienence and I have a script to enable the disabled printers but I just wanted to fiond out if there was something else I could do to prevent the disable state.

Thank you