Microport V/AT Printer Spooler non-Problem

[Phil Hughes]

Over the past year I have seen many people refer to the problem where the
V/AT spooler stops talking to a printer even though there are files in the
print queue.  lpstat shows the printer as idle but queued files exist.  I
don't think anyone has ever thought it was anything other than a V/AT bug.
Well, here is an interesting story.

One of our consulting customers has been running V/AT on a clone for over
a year.  They had an Centronics printer with parallel interface.  This
problem never happened.  They just called because of a death of their
printer.  I suggested they swipe a printer from their DOS machine to get
things running.  They have a Brother printer.  When they plugged it in
printing took off.

About 1 hour later they called back.  Things had stopped working.  An
lpstat showed the old "printer spooler bug" - idle printer but files in
the queue.  This is only one data point but it sounds to me like there is
a difference between Centronics and Centronics compatible.
-- 
Phil Hughes, SSC, Inc. P.O. Box 55549, Seattle, WA 98155  (206)FOR-UNIX
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