/dead.letter and printer

[Shashang Sheth]

Guys,
In HP-Ux 11.11, I recently faced this issue where on my active cluster node which is also heavily used for print services, the files under '/' path were found missing (only files not directories). This had a major impact on the print services. Whenever a print command was executed and then lpstat used to check the job status, I got an error message suggesting that the print queue is not configured on the server.
After comparying the files under '/' directory path on the passive node, I found that /dead.letter was missing from the active node. I created the /dead.letter file using the touch command and the printer started working fine.

As per my information dead.letter is used by mail services for unmailable text. Can anyone explain how would the printer services be affected due to missing /dead.letter file?

[Shashang Sheth]

Here are the messages that I got while trying to fire a print on any print queue:
warusdb6: # lp -d8093 /etc/motd
lp: no such printer or class "8093"
warusdb6: # lp -d8004 /etc/motd
lp: no such printer or class "8004"
warusdb6: #

[TTr]

/dead.letter is in no way related to the functionality of the spooling system. I always delete the /dead.letter file whenever I see it (after I quickly look through it). Maybe something else became about regarding the lp spooler while you touched the /dead.letter file. So based on your theory, if you delete the dead.letter file does the spooler stop?
PS. Aren't you concerned how the files in / got removed?

[skt_skt]

comapare directories /etc/lp and /var/spool/lp and subdirectories under them

[Shashang Sheth]

TTR,
We are investigating the cause of the files deleted from / directory but unable to make much progress in that. I have not deleted the /dead.letter file and checked if the print services stop working or not. Not sure if I would be able to do it now.

[TTr]

> We are investigating the cause of the files deleted from / directory but unable to make much progress in that.

You never asked for help on this in the original posting, but I have seen this before in one case where all files (not directories) in /psoft were being deleted repeatedly. It may or may not be the same for you. The clue here is that only files got deleted, not directories. A prime suspect for this is a cleanup script that is run manually or from cron. Bear with me as I explain.
Let's say that you want to clean up some files in a directory and you use this script
cd /some/folder/app/logs
rm *
And you run this script either manually or in cron and it runs fine. Now after some time the entire /app/logs is deleted but the script is forgotten in cron and continues to run. What will the script do? The first line "cd ..." will give an error and return to the current directory. The current directory is either the home directory if the script runs from cron or the current directory if the script is run manually. Now the second line gets executed and all the files are deleted in the wrong directory.