Report showing when printers were last used

Products

• Spool

Issue/Introduction

Can ESFPRINT or ESFEZSP utilities be used to generate a report showing when printers were last used?  If not, is it possible to generate a report in Spool with these details?

Environment

Release : 14.0

Component : Spool

Resolution

The ESFMGRW utility seems to be exactly what you need. Please, take a look at this link:

https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/ca-mainframe-software/traditional-management/ca-spool/14-0/using/utilities/esfmgrw-utility.html

This utility reads what is "live"  in the Spool control blocks. It doesn't read the parameters. The keyword LASTUSED in the parameter is only updated when Spool is shutdown. The purpose of this process is to retain the last used time stamp to be used when Spool is restarted. At startup, Spool reads the LASTUSED value that is in the ESFNODE member for each printer and populates the last used column in the panel and other means that can read this information like the ESFMGRW utility.

Important: Only nodes defined in the ESFNODE DD concatenation have their last used property updated. Also, moving nodes from the ESFPARM concatenation to the ESFNODE concatenation is not just a matter of copying the definitions to that member. The ESFNODE member only supports some of the keywords of a NODE statement. They are:

Dest Printer name
DEFNODE DEFNODE printer model used
Group Network group to which the printer belongs
Alias Printer alias name
VPS Virtual printer name
Location Printer location
TCP/IP Host Address TCP/IP host name or address
TCP/IP Printer Name TCP/IP printer queue name

All the other parameters like TCPDRIV, TRANSFRM, etc must be in a DEFNODE statement that will remain in the ESFPARM concatenation. So, please, plan carefully this move of definitions from the ESFPARM concatenation to the ESFNODE member.