Saving printer cofig with lpmgr (with and without spooler down)

[skt_skt]

What is the advantage/disadvange when the spooler is up/down when lpmgr save(-S) function is performed?.

Consider a scenario with more than 5000 printers.I prefer to take the backup when spooler is up as it does not need the spooler down and no one will be able to add/delete/modify any printers when the spooler is up.This is proven technic and i trust this method.

what is your experience?

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

You don't even need to use lpmgr. You regular backups that get /etc/lp and /var/spool/lp will suffice and can be done while the spooler is running. As with any backup, that would restore you to where you were at that point in time.

I really only find lpmgr usefule when transferring a printer environment from one OS version to another otherwise I simply copy the lp directories.

Now, if you really have 5000 printers then you should really look at something other than the System V spooler because having to shutdown lp to add or delete a printer is difficult. The new spooler under 11.31 deals with this nicely.

[skt_skt]

We do add/delete/modify on our one server(act as master print server) and replicate this changes to all the other servers in the night on a daily basis using a script.bring down scheduler;update;bring up schdeduler;

One day the /var got full when the printer modification was happening and pstatus saved with zero size(the way HP-UX's lp sub system behave when the /var is full and an an update is tried on pstatus).

with out noticing this, the same config was restored on new servers.(lpmgr -S and lpmgr -R).The pstatus file is fixed on the source server and others need to be fixed.

any way to regenerate the right pstatus file without restoring a known working config.

[skt_skt]

no more points to discuss now.