Other UUCP stuff

[Chris McCoy]

In <1990Aug15.221949.5492 at moore.com> paul at moore.com (Paul Maclauchlan) writes:

>[Note: posted for a friend...]

>Geoff Coleman (geoff at edm.uucp) wrote:
>>I came across a problem today with uux. On our System V (actualy CTIX 6) 
>>we do remote prinitng by putting the line
>>
>>         uux -c machine!lp !$file
>>
>>in the interface file in place of the usual cat $file line.
>>
>>When sending files to the 6000 for this it returns a message to uucp account
>>that the spooler can't find /usr/spool/uucp/.Xqtdir/<filename>. Any ideas on 
>>this one. As well in there documentation they say that
>>

...[problem and analysis deleted]...

>I determined that the file IS being copied across to the remote system to be
>printed because I started a small loop to copy all files in
>/usr/spool/uucp/.Xqtdir to somewhere else and THERE IT WAS!  The problem seems
>to be that the uuxqt process passes the job over the print daemon and then
>removes the data file before the print daemon has a chance to print it.
>It also seems to be a timing thing since once in a while it did work for me.

>It seems now that it is a fundamental conflict between the uuxqt jobs and
>the queuing system since it has been propagated to the RS/6000.  I suggest
>that you submit the problem to IBM for AIX v3 and see if they get any 
>further with it.

We have done much with remote (UUCP) printing here and have had similar
problems with other versions of UNIX.  Our experiences (with other
system V machines) have shown that the problem lies not in UUCP, but 
instead lies with 'lp'.  In general the 'lp' command does nothing more 
than prepare a queue entry -- the lpsched does the printing.  And 'lp' 
usually does not spool a copy of the file to be printed to an 
'lp spool area'.

So, in the above mentioned case what happens is that UUCP finishes the 
transfer, executes the command, then cleans up.  Later, when lpsched
tries to print the file, it's gone.  On our other systems, we have 'lp'
spool a copy of the file before printing.  This also avoids the case of
running 'lp' then 'rm' on a file.  
--

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Chris McCoy                         : INTERNET:   mccoy at ecn.purdue.edu
Communication Systems Programmer    : UUCP:       ...!ecn-ee!mccoy
Ag. Computer Network, Purdue Univ.  : VOICE:      (317) 494-8339
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