corruption of printer queue

[Dorothy Lim]

I hv 2 occassion when the printer just "disappear" from /etc/lp/interface/model.orig.

This causes the lpstat & all relate lp command to hang.

The lpsched/lpshut command does not sync.

The problem was resolved after I transfer the print queue file from another server with similiar settings.

Can anyone help me to determine what as the cause or I can prevent such problem ?

Thks

[Stefan Farrelly]

interesting problem. Firstly, files just dont disappear on HP-UX. Someone/somthing is removing them. How to find out is going to be difficult. The permissions on this directory are/should be root only so its a root user/process thats doing it. Do all your root users have shell history files setup ? if so can you check them to see if anyone has been looking around this directory. If not you can set them up by adding a line to the root users .profile; HISTFILE= and next time if it disappears you can check the history file.
Also you could setup a cron job which checks to see these files exist every 5 mins and if not email you/send a popup using xdialog etc. and then you could quickly investigate who is logged on.
As a last resort you could turn auditing on for events/system calls which remove files and then next time they disappear you will have an exact audit log of who/which process did it.
I would think its someone/somthing to do with lp, someone creating new queues, removing old ones, renaming ones or something like this.

[John Palmer]

Which file did you restore in order to cure the problem? Was it one in /var/spool/lp or one in model.orig?

Check that you have the relevant lpspool subsystem patches applied (some of which cure corruption):-

10.20 PHCO_18779
11.00 PHCO_19484

Hope this helps.

[Dorothy Lim]

I mv all the related files of the print queue to another name, then I recover the file for /etc/lp/interface/model.orig.

Next, I performed a lpstat

When everything is back to normal, I mv back all the related files.

Then the queue is back in action.

[Tim Malnati]

This is a very strange problem indeed. The model.orig files don't just disapear, there must be something in the environment doing this in error. Many SA's add cron jobs to perform cleanup activities. Take a look at the cron processes very carefully. I would suspect anything in there that is somehow trying to cleanup the spooler or possibly some find command that is getting carried away.