: change in lp breaks HP JD printer installer


"Martin Paul" <map@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4896f672$0$11610$3b214f66@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm running a print server which drives a couple of HP printers using HP's
"JetDirect Printer Installer for Unix" which works fine. Suddenly, "lp -o
duplex <file>" wasn't working anymore, ie. the printers only printed
simplex.

I tracked the problem down to Solaris 10 5/08 on the clients (actually
127127-11 seems to be the culprit). When looking at the "requests" file in
/var/lp/logs/ I see that previously "O duplex flist=..." was shown for
duplex jobs, while it is "O duplex=true flist..." now for the print jobs
submitted from 5/08 clients. The model scripts from HPJD do not recognize
this option.

The fix is to change /etc/lp/interfaces/model.orig/<printer> and the net_*
scripts in /usr/lib/lp/model/hpnpl/ to include "duplex=true" as a valid
option for duplex printing, like:

vd | duplex | duplex=true | double | d) # vertical binding

I'm sure there was a reason for Sun to change this behaviour, but it's not
nice that it breaks HP's software which used an existing interface.

-------------------------
this was not the expected or desired behavior, regardless of the fact that
jetdirect was never qualified by HP past Solaris 9.

Sun's lp now supports PAPI printing and just like the last time there was a
big change in lp (from 2.5.1 to 2.6) there are some bugs to work out. I
understand that is somewhat of an understatement.

Check out the documentation at docs.sun.com for info on the new PAPI
support. Call support as there are fixes available and patches in the
works.

My bigger gripe is that there is not a separate patch for lp, but instead
it's included in the kernel patch. There's no way to just patchrm the lp
patch to get the old behaviour. It's one of the reasons why it's REALLY
bad to include everything into kernel patches; we had that discussion
before.

let me tell ya it stinks for everyone: the user, the support person and the
code maintainer. Perhaps the 6 month Opensolaris release cycle and IPS can
be integrated into Solaris sooner rather than later. In the meantime, there
is patching best practices info available from the Sun patching team here:

http://blogs.sun.com/patch/entry/patch_management_best_practices


mp.
--
SysAdmin | Institute of Scientific Computing, University of Vienna
PCA | Analyze, download and install patches for Solaris
| http://www.par.univie.ac.at/solaris/pca/


.

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