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[Gerard Seibert]

Matthew Seaman wrote:

> Woah! Reinstalling the whole OS to fix a printer problem is way overkill.
> 
> The /dev/null entry in /etc/printcap is just a place-holder.  Normally
> that entry would contain the device used to communicate to a locally
> attached printer.  However, because you're using samba, you've faked the
> system into thinking you've got a local printer, while using a print
> filter to divert the data via samba into the remote Windows printer.
> It's a bit of a hack really.
> 
> However what it does mean is that no data should actually end up being
> passed to /dev/null.  As the print system is complaining about not being
> able to get an exclusive lock on that file, perhaps it would be worth
> trying substituting some regular file that it could get a lock on.  Try
> this.
> 
>     # touch /var/log/lpd.out
>     # chmod 644 /var/log/lpd.out
>     # chown root:daemon /var/log/lpd.out
> 
> Then edit /etc/printcap and substitute /var/log/lpd.out for /dev/null
> and restart lpd.  lpd.out should just stay an empty file, but it might
> end up with a copy of anything you send to the printer in it, in which
> case siccing newsyslog(1) onto the file to keep it a manageable size
> would be a good idea.
> 
> If this works, then reporting what happened to the port maintainer and
> author of apsfilter would be indicated -- seems the behaviour of
> /dev/null has changed in recent releases sufficient to put a spanner in
> apsfilter's works.
> 
> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Matthew

I tried your suggestion but to no avail. While it did alleviate the one
error message, the overall problem still exists.

The following are the output from several attempts to print a simple
document as well as some other probably useless info.


~/tmp # lp /etc/printcap
lp: Error - scheduler not responding!

~/tmp # lp -d lp /etc/printcap
lp: Connection refused

~/tmp # lpr /etc/printcap
lpr: Error - scheduler not responding!

~/tmp # lpr -Plp /etc/printcap
lpr: Connection refused


It appears that lpd is running:

root 516 0.0 0.3 1512 1060 ?? Is 8:20AM 0:00.04 /usr/sbin/lpd

Checking on the lp status:

~/tmp # lpc status all
lp:
        queuing is enabled
        printing is enabled
        no entries in spool area
        printer idle

Finally, I gleamed these from sockstat:

root     lpd        516   3  dgram  -> /var/run/logpriv
root     lpd        516   5  stream /var/run/printer
root     lpd        516   6  tcp6   *:515                 *:*
root     lpd        516   7  tcp4   *:515                 *:*


This is becoming more than a slight annoyance.


-- 
Gerard Seibert
gerard at seibercom.net