Here's part of a msg. I've just sent to debian-bugs: --------- Finally, another weird problem. lpd is complaining about invalid printer names, but the printcap is correct; also, the behaviour is somewhat erratic. To debug this I inserted a fprintf in the routine that gets the hole lines from /etc/printcap, to show the full line, and in the calling routine, to show the returned value. This is inside a loop, that finishes when the printcap file ends. I also just made the forked children exit immediately. This way I got a large dump, with many repetitions of the printer entries, which is obviously bogus. However, putting a fflush right after the two fprintf's the problem disappeared completely!! Am I missing something or is there a problem elsewhere? ----------
I'm repeating this here because this has an important consequence: when lpd starts it forks a child for each printer it finds in /etc/printcap. The repetition of lines I mentioned above thus produces a furious fork loop. This apparently is no problem when the machine boots, but when it's running fully it can get killed. I've just restarted lpd in 5 machines here, and two of them just stopped responding and I had to press the big switch :-( There's surely a bug somewhere, but I don't know where to look for it. This is with 2.0.0 and libc 5.2.18-6. Carlos