Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!seismo!dimacs.rutgers.edu!bcm!rice!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!mit-eddie!aryeh
From: aryeh@eddie.mit.edu (Aryeh M. Weiss)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.xenix
Subject: Re: Serial Printer Problem
Message-ID: <1990Jul19.112309.5174@eddie.mit.edu>
Date: 19 Jul 90 11:23:09 GMT
References: <2070@lakesys.lakesys.com>
Reply-To: aryeh@eddie.MIT.EDU (Aryeh M. Weiss)
Organization: MIT EE/CS Computer Facilities, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 21

In article <2070@lakesys.lakesys.com> davef@lakesys.UUCP (Dave Fenske) writes:
>Has anyone ever encountered a Xenix problem in which the print spooler
>hangs when a print job is cancelled.   This occurs on a serial port, BTW.
>

Yes, this seems to happen when you cancel the job at the top of the queue
(the job that is currently printing).  Canceling a job lower down on the
queue works okay.  Usually the result is `lpsched' dies leaving some
child processes behind.  Starting the
scheduler up again then usually fixes the problem.  I ended up writing a fake
`lp' that would check to see if the scheduler was running and respawn it
if not, then call the real `lp'.  

However, other times lpsched truely hangs (its running but not doing
anything).  Sometimes even killing it off and restarting it doesn't do
any good!  Lpsched just sits there with a dozen jobs on the queue with
the printer idle!  I have to reboot!  I think that lpsched must use
some obscure system resource which the system runs out of, but there
is nothing I can think of that would cause this behavior.  Time to find
a good PD lp package.
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