Patrick and LPRng list readers,
Well, put another stupid (or at least dangerous) misconfiguration on
your list of things for which to check when whacko things start to
happen. Here goes the explanation:
As I said, we use samba to spool most of our print jobs to our various
print servers, and upgraded samba at the same time that we upgraded
LPRng and ifhp. In the course of the changes to samba from our old to
our new version, there has been a change in the way that samba spools it
files. Instead of using the old machine_name.five_seemingly
_random_characters name, it now uses the name of the file that it gets
from the Windows desktop. Guess how common names like, oh, say,
"Microsoft Word - Document 1" or "IMAPmailsrv1.mitre.orgfetch" are?
That's right, common enough that they get stepped on by someone else
printing while they are being spooled. Which is what was happening in
our case. Samba does not, by default, use separate paths for the spool
directory of every printer. On our systems, it now does.
Here endeth the saga of the Mystery Print Jobs. I would like to thank
Patrick for all the help he provided in trying to track down what was
going on with LPRng when in fact nothing was.
--
Bill Knox
Senior Operating Systems Programmer/Analyst
The MITRE Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
> > From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue Sep 19 12:55:10 2000
> > Date: Tue, 19 Sep 2000 14:42:57 -0400
> > From: "William R. Knox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> > Subject: Re: LPRng: Mystery Print Jobs Appearing
> >
> > Patrick,
> > Just to let you know, this is not the case with my problems. All queues
> > have separate spool directories. One thing which I have noticed is that
> > all of the jobs with which this happens APPEAR to be forwarded from one
> > print server to another, i.e.
> > job sent to server 1 via samba
> > server 1 sends job to server 2
> > server 2 prints job
> >
> > This follows the pattern reported by [EMAIL PROTECTED], who has a
> > single central print server and many remote ones. However, this may just
> > be a coincidence, as I have only three well documented/completely
> > trustworthy instances from which to draw. We do, however, have many jobs
> > that get sent directly from the server which initially receives the job
> > to the printer, and I haven't heard from them, so...
> >
> > I haven't gone digging into the code yet, but based on the debug output
> > at which I've looked, the datafile is opened in the parent lpd process
> > before forking off a child process to print it, such that the children
> > inherit all the open file descriptors. Is it possible that the child is
> > looking at the wrong open file to print? Is this a totally insane
> > theory? Am I desperately clutching at straws or what? I'm going to start
> > wading through the code and see what there is to see.
> > --
> > Bill Knox
> > Senior Operating Systems Programmer/Analyst
> > The MITRE Corporation
>
> This makes sense... I will look at the code.
>
> Patrick
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> If you need help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or lprng-requests
> or lprng-digest-requests) with the word 'help' in the body. For the impatient,
> to subscribe to a list with name LIST, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> with: | example:
> subscribe LIST <mailaddr> | subscribe lprng-digest [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> unsubscribe LIST <mailaddr> | unsubscribe lprng [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> If you have major problems, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word
> LPRNGLIST in the SUBJECT line.
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you need help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or lprng-requests
or lprng-digest-requests) with the word 'help' in the body. For the impatient,
to subscribe to a list with name LIST, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
with: | example:
subscribe LIST <mailaddr> | subscribe lprng-digest [EMAIL PROTECTED]
unsubscribe LIST <mailaddr> | unsubscribe lprng [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If you have major problems, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word
LPRNGLIST in the SUBJECT line.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
