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Date:      Sun, 11 Jan 98 23:18:55 -0500
From:      Garance A Drosehn <gad@mlor.its.rpi.edu>
To:        ac199@hwcn.org
Cc:        FreeBSD-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   lpr in FreeBSD 3.x
Message-ID:  <9801120418.AA01068@mlor.its.rpi.edu>
References:  <Pine.BSF.3.96.980111131035.205B-100000@localhost>

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Tim Vanderhoek <ac199@hwcn.org> wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 09, 1998 at 07:04:07PM -0800, papowell@astart.com wrote:
> > I am the developer of the LPRng print spooler software - a replacement
> > for the BSD LPR spooler.  I would like to contact the BSD distribution
> > group and recommend that they replace their BSD LPR distribution with
> > LPRng,  or offer it as an alternative.

FWIW, I think it's good for the ports collection to include the latest
version of LPRng, but I wouldn't use it to replace the version of lpr
coming up in FreeBSD 3.0.  Maybe after waiting some more to see it in
action, but not yet.

> It's also briefly discussed in the handbook section on setting up
> one's printer.  WRT to our current lpr, I think that wollman has
> been doing some work of some sort on it.

Speaking of which...

I use a much earlier version of FreeBSD's lpr on our systems here
at RPI, and am now trying to sync up with FreeBSD's (I'm running
it on Solaris, AIX4, and IRIX...).  All the changes in the 3.x
snapshot make that a bit more challenging, but the changes do all
interest me.  I particularly like the fact that many of the changes
are intent on making lpr/lpd/etc even more robust in a number of
situations.

I don't follow freebsd enough to know who Wollman is, but I had
some questions and ideas for similar changes, and wanted to know
who to bounce those off of.  We have a few hundred unix hosts with
about 200 print queues using this lpr/lpd (and some PC's which send
jobs to those unix hosts), so I stumble across some things that
maybe others don't see...

Sample issues:

recvjob changes the name of a cf-file to match the hostname which
sent the file (this is probably for the benefit of rmjob).  However,
'lpc clean' assumes that the cf-file matches the names of all
df-files it sends.  This assumption can cause very unpleasent
results if you have jobs coming from multi-homed hosts.  This
renaming of the cf-file also causes trouble in some other situations,
but then there's a question of how to fix it without breaking other
things.

There's apparently some implementations of lpr for the PC which
don't include an 'H' field in the cf-file.  This means filters are
passed a null hostname.  I'd encourage the user with this lpr to
use a different version, except that of course I can't figure out
who the user is, or what hostname they are coming from.  Seems to
me that it'd be useful for recvjob to check the cf file for an H
line, and add one if it's not already there.  There are other things
in the cf-file which should probably be checked when receiving the
file, too.

So, anyway, where should I forward these and other questions to?

---
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer        (MIME & NeXTmail capable)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA



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