obscure lpd problem?

[Tony Willis]

Recently I had occasion to replace brain damaged VMS/Ultrix connection
on our VAX 780 (a VMS machine) with Multinet (a great product by the
way and it has a much better NFS server than does VMS/Ultrix connection).
Anyway, Multinet's ability to let a Unix box on a local network see
one of the printers on the VMS machine as a remote printer finally allowed
me to directly print files on my DECstation 3100 with lpr 
(previously I had been sending the files to the VAX via DECnet).

After specifying the remote printer in /etc/printcap I tried to lpr a   
few files and all that seemed to happen was that the files would get
dumped into the spooling directory /usr/spool/lpd1. lpd would not
send them over to the VAX. (ps -ax showed that lpd was supposedly active.)
Use of lpq showed that the DECstation was aware of the remote printer
since it showed the VMS queue for the specified printer plus all the files
sitting around in /usr/spool/lpd1.

Anyway, to make a long story short I seem to have found that everything seems
to work OK if I shut the entire machine off, then turn it back on and
boot from the  >> console prompt. Then everything seems OK and files do
get sent to the VAX for printing. However if I become su and have to
reboot by issuing the 'reboot' command at the # prompt, then the
problem described in paragraph two reappears - lpd seems dead (this sort
of reboot had been done some time prior to the activities described in
paragraph two). I tried going through a lot of hoops with lpc, etc
but nothing seems to cure this problem short of a complete shutdown.

Have I missed something obvious (forgotten to RTFM something - although
DEC software support was unable to come up with any obvious answer either)
or have others encountered this problem? Any solutions? Thanks,

Tony Willis
twillis at drao.nrc.ca
twillis at nrcdra.bitnet