no spool file for stdlist in HP-UX 11.23

[Troy Nightingale]

We send all of our batch jobs output to a printer called stdlist. This ends up putting the spool file in /var/spool/stdlist. This works perfectly under HP-UX 11.00 and 11.11. However, we have recently setup a few new servers running 11.23 (some PA-RISC and some Integrity). Even tho our setup is the same on all of these systems, it does not create an output file to any directory we can find.

Any ideas?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Maybe you need to set it manually up in 11.23?

Perhaps you should manually create the directory and then run through your setup procedure.

SEP

[A. Clay Stephenson]

That is not a standard file or directory on any flavor of UNIX that I am familiar with. It will probably be one of two schemes: 1) a named pipe 2) a directory that whenever a file appears here; it is spooled by a process and deleted.

You will need to see what mechanisms are in place on the old box. An ls -l /var/spool/stdlist would help to understand what mechanism is in place but I'm betting on a named pipe.

[Troy Nightingale]

This is how we set it up;

â ¢ Stand Lists Printer configuration
stdlist - copy /usr/lib/lp/model/stdlist from another system
use Sam to setup a local printer with non-standard device file
printer name = stdlist
printer model/interface = stdlist
printer device file name = /dev/null
cd /var/spool
mkdir stdlist
chmod 777 stdlist
To test: lp -dstdlist -c -odoc=test /etc/hosts

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I would need to see this stdlist interface file (I assume it is a script though it could be a real executable) but it sounds as though there is a daemon that actually monitors your stdlist directory and that is what is missing. I do seem to recall that MPE used a stdlist device so you may be looking at some very old legacy code. My expertise with MPE about ends with the spell of MPE. It should be possible to make this work at 11.23 if it worked at 11.11.

[Troy Nightingale]

Here is a copy of the non-standard printer driver we call stdlist.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

First of all, change your /usr/spool references to /var/spool in this interface file. The use of /usr has been frowned upon for at least 10 years. You should also make a /var/spool/stdlist directory and I would make lp the directory's owner.

Next do an ls -l of /var/spool/lp/interface/stdlist. This file should have permissions 755 and be owned by lp:bin. Lp is extremely sensitive to file ownerships.

Let's see where this gets you. In the worst case, you may need to put some probes that echo to a file in the interface but I'm betting it's a file ownership thing.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

By the way, I am making the silly assumption that a) lpsched is running b) you have run an accept command on this printer c) this printer is enabled.