lpr: remote spooling & problems

[David Parter]

we have been having several problems recently with the remote spooling
and printing facility of lpr/lpd. The software we are running is the
modified lpr from Patrick Powell.

We have many vaxen and a few assorted other machines all running 4.2
or 4.2 ports, with a 750 as the spooler/printer.

The problems occur when something changes on the spooler: either a
network failure or a printer has to be taken out of service are the
recent examples.  When this happens, the remote lpds hang, and it is 
very difficult to restart them correctly.  

After the lpd is running on the spooler again, doing an lpq on a remote
machine will correctly report what is in the local queue, will connect
to the spooler and correctly report nothing in the queue there, but 
attemping to print something will report that the connection to the
spooler is down.  Getting it to send files again requires killing the
local lpd and restarting. Sometimes this process has to be repeated
multiple times, and with many machines on our localnet, is a problem.

If anyone has a solution, please send mail. If anyone has any alternate
software that handles this situation in a more graceful manner, plus the
question of moving jobs from one queue to another, we would be interested.

thanks,

david
-- 
david parter
UWisc Systems Lab

uucp:	...!{allegra,harvard,ihnp4,seismo, topaz}!uwvax!david
arpa now:	david at wisc-rsch.arpa
arpa soon:	david at wisc-rsch.WISCONSIN.EDU or something like that