Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!purdue!haven!adm!cmcl2!lanl!silbar@mpx2.lampf.lanl.gov From: silbar@mpx2.lampf.lanl.gov (SILBAR, RICHARD R.) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: What happened with lpd problems? Message-ID: <4934@lanl.gov> Date: 4 Nov 90 15:56:51 GMT Sender: news@lanl.gov Lines: 32 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)