Since my last explosion of bitching about LPRng 3.8.12 went unanswered... :)
... not that I blame anyone for that. :)
Anyway -- here's the deal.
We have been having major trouble getting banner pages to work with LPRng.
This started out with 3.8.6 on our Solaris 8 print server. When we moved to
3.8.12, we started having problems all over again like we used to have --
for some reason it seems that LPRng just isn't that happy on Solaris 8. We
have numerous problems when running LPRng on Solaris -- many versions have
unexpected and unexplained behavior. Such as... the "lpc reread" command
will simply return some high ASCII character to the screen and not HUP the
lpd process... but "lpc reread all" works as expected. 3.8.12 also refused
to write any log or status files... while 3.8.6 works OK. We settled on
3.8.6 because MOST things worked on Solaris 8 under that version.. "lpc
reread" for instance actually did what it was supposed to, and it wrote logs
and accounting files.
Finally we threw our hands in the air with Solaris and LPRng and dug an old
Pentium 200 PC out of the corner and installed Debian Linux on it. I've
been working with various versions of LPRng on it over the past few days.
While LPRng does NOT exhibit the same random problems on Linux as I've
described above, we STILL can't get banner pages working. I've tried this
both with our custom PS banner generating script as well as the supplied
"psbanner" script. The problem seems to be tied somehow to when the
:generate_banner flag is enabled in the printcap. It actually took us a
while to even find that we NEEDED to have :generate_banner in there. We
were banging our heads against the wall wondering why the :bp, :bs, :be,
:ab, etc... wasn't enough.
Here's the strange thing.... if we manually run the banner scripts and send
the output to the printer (which passes through IFHP), it prints the page
just fine. However, if we use the :generate_banner flag to have LPRng
automatically generate the banners, IFHP segfaults every time. This happens
on BOTH our Solaris 8 server and the new Linux server. Here is what shows
up in the status.pr file for the printer:
waiting for subserver to exit at 2002-05-23-17:12:14.410 ## A=<NULL>
number=0 process=4182
creating banner at 2002-05-23-17:12:14.419 ## A=root@new-printers+181
number=181 process=4183
Filter_file: pgm '/etc/lprng/psbanner' exited with status 'JSUCC' at
2002-05-23-17:12:15.265 ## A=root@new-printers+181 number=181 process=4183
processing 'dfA181new-printers', size 373, format 'f', IF filter 'ifhp' at
2002-05-23-17:12:15.268 ## A=root@new-printers+181 number=181 process=4183
IF filter 'ifhp' filter finished at 2002-05-23-17:12:16.078 ##
A=root@new-printers+181 number=181 process=4183
subserver pid 4183 died with signal 'Segmentation fault' at
2002-05-23-17:12:16.080 ## A=<NULL> number=0 process=4182
job 'root@new-printers+181' error 'aborting operations' at
2002-05-23-17:12:16.082 ## A=root@new-printers+181 number=181 process=4182
It looks like the process that LPRng forks to do the banner generation dies
with a segfault, even though psbanner exits with JSUCC and IFHP reports that
it's done?
We are using the default lpd.conf, and here's what the test printcap
contains:
eva|Eva
:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
:ifhp=model=ps,pagecount,sync
# :as=jobstart $k $n $P $H
# :af=egr-admin-1.egr.unlv.edu%667
# :achk
# :create_files
:sd=/var/spool/lpd/%P
:lf=/var/lpd/log/%P.errs
:af=/var/lpd/log/%P.acct
:bs=/etc/lprng/psbanner
:ab
:filter=/libexec/filters/ifhp
:if=/libexec/filters/ifhp
:of=/libexec/filters/ifhp
:generate_banner
Does anyone (Patrick?) have any ideas why this is happening or how in the
world to fix it?
Thanks very much in advance.
---
Keith Rinaldo
Systems Administrator
College of Engineering
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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