From owner-freebsd-hackers Sun Jan 11 19:37:33 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) id TAA17548 for hackers-outgoing; Sun, 11 Jan 1998 19:37:33 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from mail1.its.rpi.edu (root@mail1.its.rpi.edu [128.113.100.7]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id TAA17537 for ; Sun, 11 Jan 1998 19:37:22 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from gad@mlor.its.rpi.edu) Received: from mlor.its.rpi.edu (mlor.its.rpi.edu [128.113.24.92]) by mail1.its.rpi.edu (8.8.8/8.8.6) with SMTP id WAA83752; Sun, 11 Jan 1998 22:37:15 -0500 Received: by mlor.its.rpi.edu (NX5.67f2/NX3.0M) id AA01068; Sun, 11 Jan 98 23:18:56 -0500 Message-Id: <9801120418.AA01068@mlor.its.rpi.edu> Mime-Version: 1.0 (NeXT Mail 3.3 v118.2) Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Received: by NeXT.Mailer (1.118.2) From: Garance A Drosehn Date: Sun, 11 Jan 98 23:18:55 -0500 To: ac199@hwcn.org Subject: lpr in FreeBSD 3.x Cc: FreeBSD-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Reply-To: gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu References: Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-MIME-Autoconverted: from quoted-printable to 8bit by hub.freebsd.org id TAA17542 Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk Tim Vanderhoek wrote: > On Fri, Jan 09, 1998 at 07:04:07PM -0800, papowell@astart.com wrote: > > I am the developer of the LPRng print spooler software - a replacement > > for the BSD LPR spooler. I would like to contact the BSD distribution > > group and recommend that they replace their BSD LPR distribution with > > LPRng, or offer it as an alternative. FWIW, I think it's good for the ports collection to include the latest version of LPRng, but I wouldn't use it to replace the version of lpr coming up in FreeBSD 3.0. Maybe after waiting some more to see it in action, but not yet. > It's also briefly discussed in the handbook section on setting up > one's printer. WRT to our current lpr, I think that wollman has > been doing some work of some sort on it. Speaking of which... I use a much earlier version of FreeBSD's lpr on our systems here at RPI, and am now trying to sync up with FreeBSD's (I'm running it on Solaris, AIX4, and IRIX...). All the changes in the 3.x snapshot make that a bit more challenging, but the changes do all interest me. I particularly like the fact that many of the changes are intent on making lpr/lpd/etc even more robust in a number of situations. I don't follow freebsd enough to know who Wollman is, but I had some questions and ideas for similar changes, and wanted to know who to bounce those off of. We have a few hundred unix hosts with about 200 print queues using this lpr/lpd (and some PC's which send jobs to those unix hosts), so I stumble across some things that maybe others don't see... Sample issues: recvjob changes the name of a cf-file to match the hostname which sent the file (this is probably for the benefit of rmjob). However, 'lpc clean' assumes that the cf-file matches the names of all df-files it sends. This assumption can cause very unpleasent results if you have jobs coming from multi-homed hosts. This renaming of the cf-file also causes trouble in some other situations, but then there's a question of how to fix it without breaking other things. There's apparently some implementations of lpr for the PC which don't include an 'H' field in the cf-file. This means filters are passed a null hostname. I'd encourage the user with this lpr to use a different version, except that of course I can't figure out who the user is, or what hostname they are coming from. Seems to me that it'd be useful for recvjob to check the cf file for an H line, and add one if it's not already there. There are other things in the cf-file which should probably be checked when receiving the file, too. So, anyway, where should I forward these and other questions to? --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.its.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer (MIME & NeXTmail capable) Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Troy NY USA