HP Print servers can be funny sometimes, usually because the printer went offline because of being out of paper (in this case labels) or jamming. The print server sends a message back to the Unix queue to stop the queue, but when the printer comes back on line, it never re-starts the unix queue.

Sometimes, if you wait long enough, the HP print server and the Unix queue will eventually sort them selves out and start printing again (which is what is sounds like happened). There are two other tricks I've found. Cancel the first job waiting to print, which means the second job query's the HP printserver and finds that it is on line and the queue starts printing again. Another thing to try is to shut down the lp print spooler on unix. /usr/spool/lpshut (stops the lp print spooler and all printing on the unix box is stopped, except for printers using rlp) and then /usr/spool/lpsched to restart the lp print spooler.

A Unix printer setup with rlp behaves a bit different, sometimes the queue never get's cleared, and the way to clear that queue is to kill the rlp print spooler on the Unix box, and restart it, or reboot the server.

Now, the guy who mentioned netcat, although not very helpfull for your problem is correct in a way. The Netcat program is very robust and stable. Getting it going to not hard, you can find very good instructions at the A.P. Lawrence website (aplawrence.com).