July 24, 2019

Old Suns and Printing

We have a printer in the casting control room. The suns cannot print to it. It is "mlhp5" and a line in the hosts file looks like: 
10.130.91.7     mlhp5
We can ping this printer just fine from the Suns. Also it was trivial to set up printing from our linux machine in the same room. Note that both the suns and the linux machine have 192.168.1.13 addresses, but this is just fine, though a bit peculiar given the printer and these machines are in the same room.

The linux setup worked using "socket:mlhp5:9100".

The sun gives the following absolutely useless message. What in the world does "exec exit fault" mean? 


Message from lp on dorado (???) [ Wed May 29 16:37:28 ] ...
Subject: Problem with printer mlhp5

The printer mlhp5 has stopped printing for the reason given below.
Fix the problem and bring the printer back on line.
Printing has stopped, but will be restarted in a few minutes;
issue an enable command if you want to restart sooner.
Unless someone issues a change request

lp -i mlhp5-1 -P ...

to change the page list to print, the current request will be reprinted from
the beginning.

The reason(s) it stopped (multiple reasons indicate repeated attempts):

exec exit fault
The sun uses a file /etc/printers.conf, which has an entry as follows: 
default:\
        :use=mlhp5:

mlhp5:\
	:bsdaddr=dorado,mlhp5,Solaris:\
	    :description=casting control room:

The fix

The problem was some kind of change in DNS configuration outside of these machines. The "fix" is to modify the printers.conf file and use static IP numbers, also bypassing the use of the suns as a printer queue (which is fine). The new entry is printers.conf looks like: 
mlhp5:\
	:bsdaddr=10.130.91.7,10.130.91.7,Solaris:\
	    :description=casting control room:
The full situation is not fully understood, but it has to do with resolving the name "dorado" in a FQDN context. Ultimately old quirky (buggy?) solaris software and we are glad to move on and forget all about it.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's home page / [email protected]