jbayer@ispi.COM (Jonathan Bayer) (08/17/90)
There is a bug I have seen mentioned in the Xenix spooler recently. This is that the spooler seems to stop working on a random basis. This is caused by a race condition in the spooler. SCO gave me a workaround to this a while ago: 1. Create a dummy printer, make it the default printer. DO NOT USE THIS PRINTER FOR PRINTING. 2. Add the following line to /etc/profile: LPDEST=printer; export LPDEST replace "printer" with what you want your default printer to be. 3. Add the following line to /etc/cshrc: setenv LPDEST printer Again, replace "printer" with what you want your default printer to be. 4. Shut down the spooler using "/usr/lib/lpshut". 5. Kill any existing processes that have the name "lpsched" 6. Restart the spooler using "/usr/lib/lpsched". This will fix the problem. JB -- Jonathan Bayer Intelligent Software Products, Inc. (201) 245-5922 500 Oakwood Ave. jbayer@ispi.COM Roselle Park, NJ 07204
aryeh@eddie.mit.edu (Aryeh M. Weiss) (08/19/90)
In article <1672@ispi.COM> jbayer@ispi.COM (Jonathan Bayer) writes: > >There is a bug I have seen mentioned in the Xenix spooler recently. >This is that the spooler seems to stop working on a random basis. This >is caused by a race condition in the spooler. SCO gave me a workaround >to this a while ago: Sorry, I just don't believe that this will cure the problem in the long term. I have a theory that the real problem is lpsched failing to remove a certain lockfile, /usr/spool/lpd/lock. This file gets created when lpsched has started a specific print job, and gets removed when that job is done. (I can accept that a race condition will result in this file not getting removed.) It seems that when the job at the top of the queue gets canceled, lpsched *sometimes* hangs. I have had the experience of shutting down and restarting lpsched, only to have it remain hung. Unfortunately I didn't know about this lockfile: I had been looking for a lockfile in /usr/spool/lp. (The rc.d scripts remove this file --- thus rebooting the system solves the problem!) --