Re: printing woes

["Steve Poling" <sdpoling@xxxxxxxx>]

Status of my printing problem: FIXED

You may recall I upgraded to RH6.2 and printing quit working. I chased a
number of really deep wrong problems. Basically, this is what I learned to
get things working again.

1. trust printtool and distrust lpc
2. lpc will tell you the daemon is not present when lpd is alive and well
3. lpc will not restart or start the print daemon, but printtool will (see
#1)
4. Samba is pickier about print queues. (This was the real problem.)
5. Don't forget to cycle power on your printer(s)

I had two queues for each printer lp & Apple and lp0 and HP, going to
/dev/ttyS0 and /dev/lp0 respectively. Used to be I could play fast and loose
sending stuff to either print queue and it'd get to the right place. Somehow
I had Windows clients using the "Apple" network mount point when it should
have been using the "lp" and thus my print jobs were going to who knows
where, /dev/null probably.

It didn't help that my Apple laser printer got wedged. It's a serial
printer, and I broke down and booted dos and started talking to it with a
terminal program. When it didn't respond to the ^C or ^D commands to
terminate input, (though ^T worked fine) I cycled power on the unit and
everything started working fine. If you ever have a postscript printer, you
can talk to it using ascii commands and that makes for easy debugging of
printer problems.

My recommendation: if your printing quits working, double check Samba and
cycle power on the printer. Maybe the chmod 666 /dev/lp0 (and /dev/ttyS0)
did some good, but the other problems obscured the effect.

smiles and cheers,

steve