silbar@mpx2.lampf.lanl.gov (SILBAR, RICHARD R.) (11/04/90)
It seems to me that, within the last month, there were two posters here who were having problems with lpd, the print-spooler daemon. I had a brief correspondence with one (maybe both?) of the posters on this, since I was once having a similar problem last February. However, whatever suggestions I could make were not very useful to the fellow at the time -- his troubles weren't so easily cured/worked around as mine. Besides, I didn't really remember all that well what I did/had to do to cure the problem. I don't recall seeing any followup that said what the troubles actually were and how (or if) the posters were able to get out of them. What did happen? The reason I am reminded of this is because, all of a sudden last Tuesday, I too could no longer print anything with lpr from a shell. (No problems printing from a menu item in an application.) This sounds much more like what the earlier postings were about. I got my daemon back, finally, on Friday afternoon, after an unpleasantly long bout of flailing about. I won't go into any details here. Actually, I should say "we", since I had an hour and a half of invaluable help from Joe Klecska here at this Lab, which is what broke the problem. Basically, what (I think) cured it all was completely deleting my /usr/spool directory on my hard disk and re- reading it in from the OS 1.0 optical disk. (Followed by fixing up all the spool subdirectories for "local, special" printers.) The problem with this solution is I still don't know HOW my spool directory got corrupted (locked-up?) and how this can be avoided in the future. Does anybody have any useful insights? Dick Silbar (NeXT mail: silbar@whistler.lanl.gov)
yyeap@ub.d.umn.edu (Yeap Yuen Pin) (11/05/90)
In article <4934@lanl.gov> silbar@mpx2.lampf.lanl.gov (SILBAR, RICHARD R.) writes: >It seems to me that, within the last month, there were two posters here >who were having problems with lpd, the print-spooler daemon. I had a >brief correspondence with one (maybe both?) of the posters on this, since That was me. Thanks for the help. >I don't recall seeing any followup that said what the troubles actually >were and how (or if) the posters were able to get out of them. What did >happen? Well, I still can't print from the shell. I tried to resemble our printcap file as much as yours but it still didn't work. I still get the unknown printer problem in "lf" file and can't start daemon message on the screen. If I delete /dev/printer, kill and restart lpd manually, all the jobs that stuck in the queue will get flush. But this is something you don't want to do it all the time :-). Following is the error messages I got if I tried to start or stop the daemon from lpc: edsel.d.umn.edu# lpc lpc> start Local_Printer Local_Printer: couldn't start daemon lpc> stop Local_Printer Local_Printer: cannot create lock file lpc> status Local_Printer: queuing is enabled printing is enabled no entries no daemon present next: queuing is enabled printing is enabled no entries no daemon present mwah1: queuing is enabled printing is enabled no entries no daemon present lpc> >The reason I am reminded of this is because, all of a sudden last Tuesday, >I too could no longer print anything with lpr from a shell. (No problems >printing from a menu item in an application.) This sounds much more like >what the earlier postings were about. Exactly. >Klecska here at this Lab, which is what broke the problem. Basically, what (I >think) cured it all was completely deleting my /usr/spool directory on my hard >disk and re- reading it in from the OS 1.0 optical disk. (Followed by fixing >up all the spool subdirectories for "local, special" printers.) That's interesting. I will try that later (I am kind of busy now). > >The problem with this solution is I still don't know HOW my spool directory >got corrupted (locked-up?) and how this can be avoided in the future. > >Does anybody have any useful insights? If anyone does, PLEASE TELL me! BTW, does this have anything to do with the fact that we configure the machine to run in non-netinfo and yp network? > Dick Silbar (NeXT mail: silbar@whistler.lanl.gov) Yeap Yuen Pin Internet: yyeap@ub.d.umn.edu Information Services. Bitnet: yyeap@UMNDUL University of Minnesota, Duluth