[plug] Update on Mandrake & printing

[William kenworthy]

Hi all,
	may help some:
Posted a while back (I didnt mean to start the saga that developed -
honest!) about installing Mandrake 7 and printing.  Reinstalling mandrake
worked, programs compiled and ran with no errors and I could print - for a
short while anyway!  I thing a plain, near totally unchanged previous
version would upgrade ok, but as I had built a lot of programs from source
(QT, samba, various libs) and installed some Mandrake 7 librs over the top
of 6.1 libs there were just too many loose ends - Ive learnt my lesson!  I
could print for a day or so then it stopped working again - no error
messages, just no print jobs arriving at the smb print server (win98)
Could smbclient print ok, but nothing leaving linux when using lpd.

	The printing turned out to be the ./config file in /var/spool/lpd/lp
requiring a world readable privaledge before smbprint would read it.  No
errors were generated (print jobs just black holed) and eventually found it
by hacking each of the printscripts until the fault revealed itself.  It
may help others with printing problems to know that there are lines in
smbprint (and I added others) to record what share/host/etc are being used
to a file for analysis.  smbprint also appears to be used in local printing
(by using localhost) in some configurations.  Another good clue to problems
is to do a "ps aux" when the print job is running and track the result,
though this does not help with the problem above other than indicating what
programs were used.  It appears to be a bug in the redhat printtool or
possibly security settings that caused the wrong privalidges to be assigned
- but there are many other possible causes too!  The fact that I could
print for a short while threw me right off the track - maybe a later
install of some program?

	I now have a working system again and have a lot of printing/work to catch
up on!
BillK




ICQ #32340520
billk at opera.iinet.net.au
w.kenworthy at student.murdoch.edu.au