Help? LaserWriter II intermittently fails to print complete jobs

[Leonard Sitongia]

I'd like to ask for help regarding a problem with a LaserWriter II NT
printer.  This printer is interfaced to a Sun-4/280 on an ALM-II serial
port at 38.4k baud.  It exhibits an intermittent problem in which a job
printing on it will mysteriously stop in the middle of the job.

If the printer is then power cycled (off-on) the job will print to
completion.  It is intermittent because there doesn't appear to be a
correlation with particular jobs or even the *size* of the job.

The "revision" and "product" postscript commands return revision=1 and
product = "LaserWriter II NT".  The waittimeout is set to 40 seconds.  I
expected a "hanging" job to timeout and abort, but it does not.

I've noticed that in the Addison-Wesley PostScript Language Reference
Manual in Appendix D section 7 decribes known problems with the
LaserWriter PostScript interpreter, including FLOW CONTROL problems in
which the printer fails to send an XON to the host.  It describes using
the waittimeout to abort the job in this case.

Has anyone else seen this problem, and can someone comment on the
relevance of this known bug?  The book is older than our printer, so I'd
guess that it's been long since fixed.