Hi people. Forgive me if this has all been covered in the past. I have a
problem.
(this is long. I wasn't sure what was important so I mentioned a lot).
history:
we have a Laserwriter Select (from Apple). It has an appletalk cable
out the back, hooked to a contraption with the name Asantetalk on it. This
apparently converts to regular ethernet, as an ethernet cable comes out of
it. This plugs into our ethernet hub.
we have a router which forwards appletalk, and it seems to be set up
correctly.
we have macs and we have linux boxes.
It used to be the case that one of the linux machines spooled to the
printer, such that lpr worked from that linux box. The other linux machine
has a printcap to point to the first linux machine. This worked fine also.
And the macs could print to the queue on the linux box and it would print
fine.
I did not set this up. I am a software engineer, and have done sysadmin
stuff way long ago, maybe 15 years ago. I'm not completely clueless, but
its been a _long_ time since I got my fingers into this stuff, so I'm
almost clueless. :-)
OK. So. Near as I can tell, the chain of events is that the person who
did all of this stuff was trying to set up a way to get page-counts, so we
could limit the size of jobs. Or, he might have been trying to get the
second printer to work. Not succeeding in whichever endeavor he was
undertaking, he put everything back as it was. But, not completely as it
was. For one thing, I'm not sure we did spooling before.
next, sometime later, someone else decided the office where the equipment
lived, needed to be cleaned. In the process of doing this, she managed to
unplug the UPS, not bother to call me up and tell me something was beeping,
and then she managed to shutdown the phone system, and ethernet connection
as well. Since I didn't get there until many hours later, everything was
down when I arrived. After I got all back up, the printers no longer
worked.
My suspicion is that things were not quite put back correctly to the way it
had been before the experimentation, but since nothing was shutdown,
everything remembered enough to keep functioning, until everything got shut
off.
I am just having time now to tackle the problem. What I discovered is that
the .paprc file had the wrong name for the printer in it. (the name we had
when it was NOT spooled, I think). So I was getting errors with the NBP
lookup.
When I fixed the name, the linux machine could now see the printer.
But. when I print, the system goes and starts creating a bunch of small
files that it wants to send to the printer. It also sends the file I
request to print, but that never gets to the printer, because of these
other files, which don't seem to be doing much, but which seem to take
priority.
I took the line about acct (accounting) out of the printcap and the if and
of lines, and got it to only send my file, except that it seemed to lose
the file (or think it sent it to the printer?) and then would requeue it
over and over again. Only one was queued at a time.
=======================================================
So this is my printcap entry:
lp|somename|LaserWriter Select 360 on AppleTalk:\
:af=/var/spool/lpd/laser/acct:\
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/laser:\
:lp=/var/spool/lpd/laser/null:\
:lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:pw#80:sh:\
:of=/usr/lib/atalk/filters/ofpap:\
:if=/usr/lib/atalk/filters/ifpap:\
:tf=/usr/lib/atalk/filters/tfpap:\
:df=/usr/lib/atalk/filters/dfpap:
======================================================
the spare files being sent to the printer look like this:
%!PS-Adobe-2.0
%%Pages: (atend)
%%DocumentFonts: Courier
/GSV save def % global VM
/SP {
/SV save def % save vmstate
dup /H exch def % save font height
exch findfont exch scalefont setfont % select font
( ) stringwidth pop /W exch def % save font width
0.5 sub 72 mul /CY exch def % save start Y
pop 0.5 add 72 mul /CX exch def % save start X
CX CY moveto % make current point
} bind def
/S /show load def
/NL { CX CY H sub dup /CY exch def moveto } bind def
/CR { CX CY moveto } bind def
/B { W neg 0 rmoveto}bind def
/T { W mul 0 rmoveto}bind def
/EP { SV restore showpage } bind def
%%EndProlog
%%Page: ? 1
0 8.500000 11.000000 /Courier 11 SP
EP
%%Trailer
GSV restore
%%Pages: 1
%%EOF
======================================================
so. any suggestions?
anyone know -- what is making these files?
why so many are being generated?
why the printer doesn't seem to be responding to anything?
a last note. It is _absolutely impossible_ to ask the original person who
worked on this what he was doing.
thanks for any help!
Cathy
===========================================================
Catherine A. Segedy Consultant Software Engineer
Unix,Macintosh,NT,VMS
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Voice: (603) 437-1337 Fax: (603) 437-1425
http://www.enigami.com/~csegedy
http://www.enigami.com/resumes/cathy.shtml
PGP FPrint: 1104 D5D0 3D7B D088 39A6 808E A384 BD0F A572 11FC
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