Interesting "Feature" of lpsetup

[Bruce Stewart]

In article <557 at alfred.UUCP> tarpit!alfred!elliot writes:
>
>I just thought I would pass on a bit of information that I discovered this
>evening.  Should any of you out there ever get a message "setuid failed"
>when running printer setup from the user agent menu, I can tell you why. The
>password file entry for lp MUST be on line 9!!!!   I know this sounds silly,
>but I had done some messing around with the file and all of a sudden lpsetup
>went into orbit.  After an hour's worth of wasted time and numerous rude
>comments, I decided to try and use the stock password file and like MAGIC
>lpsetup returned to earth. 
>
>I hope this saves someone out there a few headaches!!
>

Since I'd just spent some time making my 7300 talk to my parallel pritner, I
was curious about this.  I tried the experiment of moving the lp entry in 
/etc/passwd to line 10, and using the ua to define a serial printer on port0 
(tty000).  I had no problems (although I did not actually attach a printer on
the port).  Perhaps you were doing something different; any details might help
to clarify things.

As another note, I discovered that despite the fact that /dev/rawlp works a
lot better than /dev/lp for a parallel device; I used lpadmin to switch the
parallel printer device from /dev/lp (set up that way by the ua) to /dev/rawlp
and performance improved markedly.  Before the switch, I was experiencing 
erratic printing (one line, pause of 10 minutes, another line, etc. -- almost
as if /dev/lp were a block device, and the buffers were never being flushed).
After the switch, bingo! -- performs as expected.  Hope this saves someone 
some time and effort.

-bruce stewart


attempting something different, and ran