Re: Print Spooler woes

[Roy M Turner <royt@pravda.gatech.edu>]

We have a 3620 running the print spooler software, with 8 other symbolics and
a Sun using the LaserWriter that's attached (the Sun uses another program
which interfaces with the Symbolics software).  We have some of the same
problems you have mentioned, namely that we get lots of serial unit locks and
such, and also have print jobs crash due to something like "accessing a tcp
(or chaos) connection that has already been closed", or some such folderol.
The serial unit locks usually come about due to the printer running out of
paper; apparently after a while, the symbolics decides the printer is dead and
never again tries to resurrect it.  This can be cured by restarting the
printer process, or by rebooting (sometimes necessary).  We also have had
problems with disk errors (bad blocks) showing up in the spooled files; these
can be "fixed" by deleting the files that have been spooled and trying again.

The print spooler software seems to be pretty buggy, or at least, dies in
strange ways, but we have found it quite useful.  If anyone who is having
trouble with theirs has specific questions about how we have got ours set up,
I will try to answer them.

	--Roy Turner