Printer Administration Potpourri for Large-Scale UNIX Systems
Bruce H. Hunter Small sites needn't worry much about printer administration. With one or two printers and one spooler system, the complications are few. For example, if the laser printer cartridge needs changing, you simply tell everyone to hold their printer requests, and then you open the printer and change the cartridge. However, if you administer a system with 200 users using 20 printers, you'd wear out your sneakers before you could tell all 200 people to hold their printer requests. But you must stop new printer requests from being accepted while you are working on the printer. If you don't, they might fill the printer spooler, and then you'll really have trouble. Large UNIX computer sites also have an additional complication. The larger the site, the more likely it is running more than one version of UNIX. In fact, you could be dealing with as many as three major versions of UNIX, each with its own, unique printer spooler. BSD UNIX has lpr; AT&T System V UNIX and Xenix have a completely different spooler called lp; and AIX has a printer spooling setup that differs from both. Streetwise UNIX system administrators learn as much as they can about all three printer spoolers. This article will give an introductory overview of UNIX printer spoolers and will examine some typical printer problems. BSD's lpr To power down a printer on a large site, you must do more than shut off the printer. You must also kill the printer daemon and disable the printer queue so that it can't accept more requests. Listing 1 shows how to stop a printer using the lpc command in interactive mode. (Note the lpc> prompt.) The lpc stop command disables the spooling daemon for that printer, and the disable turns the queue off. The session in Listing 2 restarts the queue. Note that the default machine is always lp. Troubleshooting Occasionally a printer daemon will get confused, making it difficult to restart. For example, a user whose workstation or UNIX PC doubles as a network print server might power down to move it. Look no further than lpc, which can be used interactively or noninteractively. First use lpc to stop the daemon, followed by lpc start to create a new lpr daemon. If the queue is too full, use lpc clean to purge all cf, tf, and df files from the lpr spooler area. If the printer spooler system doesn't start, don't panic; just do a shutdown and reboot. lpc and the Queue You can check queue health with the lpc status command. Listing 3 shows a status report. By the way, don't panic at that "no daemon present" message. This message refers to the server daemon, which is spawned only when there is work to be done, and which dies when the job is completed. An lpr daemon should always be present and can be checked using ps. In addition to showing whether you have any lpr daemons the ps command will also tell you if the daemons are alive. The lpr daemon will nearly always be there as a child of init (PPID 1), and it will have a very low PID number (160 in the example in Listing 4). If it is gone, you have a problem. Bypassing the Spooler If your printing problem is so severe that you can't get anything going, try to send a few characters directly to the printer's port:
%su password: # echo "are you there?"> /dev/pp0
If you're sending to a dot matrix printer, you'll hear a brief zipping noise, and a form feed should reveal your message. A laser printer, on the other hand, will give you a whole page -- wait for it! The printer may be slow to recognize that it won't be receiving more output for this page. Either way, this simple test will tell you whether you have a printer or not. If you forget the printer's port name, use cat /etc/printcap to find it. You should get a listing similar to that in Listing 5. The line that assigns the printer to a port is:
:lp=/dev/pp0
If the search fails, check the port's permissions before assuming the printer has taken off for Valhalla. You are looking for generous write permissions like these:
18% ls -l /dev/pp0 c-w--w--w- 1 root 56, 0 Nov 13 15:05 /dev/pp0 19%
Even security fanatics wouldn't be concerned with these permissions. After all, who is going to break into your printer? Instead, guard root ownership by having a nonhuman user called lp own it and all of its software. The AT&T System V Print Spooler AT&T changed its way of printing at System V Release 2 with its unique and complex lp spooler. Where Version 7 UNIX could spool to only one printer, AT&T wrote System V to be a robust, industrial-grade spooler so that UNIX could compete as a commercially viable operating system with VMS AOS/VS and VM, both of which had fairly impressive print spoolers. The lp spooling system is 10 years old now, but despite its age, it remains particularly interesting because it is capable of running multiple printers and printer batteries (with printer batteries, each printer request is sent to the most available printer). The limiting factor becomes the number of available ports. lp makes installing new printers easy and turning printers on and off even easier. Since it gives you precise control, you can start or stop any queue at any time. If a printer has a paper jam, the spooler administrator can shut down the printer (in software) and still allow the queue to continue to take requests. If a printer's cartridge is wrecked and no space is available, the lp spooler can stop that one spooler. If necessary -- and just as easily -- an entire spooler can also be shut down. The heart of the lp system is its scheduler daemon, lpsched, which handles all spooler activity either directly or indirectly. Turn the scheduler on (using lpsched) and printing can start; turn it off (using lpshut) and printing stops. Users feed printer requests to the scheduler with the lp command, which takes single files or multiple files to any legitimate printer:
$ lp -dlw1 this.doc README doc.nroff.out
or
$ nroff -mm this.doc | lp -dlw3
The cancel command cancels a print job. To use it, the user must know the printer name and the job number asigned when lp was invoked:
$ cancel 1w1-1234
Before a submitted job has been handled by lpsched, the accept and reject commands can be used to allow the system or printer administrator to refuse requests. The lpsched daemon sends the print files to the printer and the spool directory, /usr/spool/lp. (In new UNIX System V it is /var/spool/lp.) The print requests leaving the spool are channeled to predetermined printers (devices). These printers can be turned on and off with the enable and disable commands, and the requests can be moved from one printer to another with the lpmove command. The administrator's own command for manipulating all this is lpadmin. Similar in function to lpr's lpc command, lpadmin is a toolbox for the entire system. The lpstat command monitors the lp system, providing the necessary lp stats. The lp manuals distinguish between devices and printers. A printer is a virtual device, but a device is a physical entity. Since all hardware is virtual in UNIX, this distinction is not surprising. lp's major flaw is that it cannot do remote printing. Still, it is a powerful spooling system, and its design is well conceived. In spite of their multi-user capabiltiies, most PCs on large sites are used by only one user at a time. (In fact, even expensive workstations with sophisticated networking capabilities are often used by only one person at a time, especially for memory intensive applications.) However, because Xenix PCs are usually not equipped to do remote printing, if there is a printer jam, the jam upsets the printer, which in turn signals the UNIX PC that it is in trouble. Fortunately, the lp daemon, lpsched, protects the system by killing itself. Better to die in a noble cause than panic the kernel and bring down the whole system. Printer Installations The lp spooler system provides for many different kinds of printers by supplying a directory of different filters for various printer models in the models directory. Administrators copy the file to a directory, using the original as a model and modifying it as necessary. To get an HP laserjet printer online, lpadmin has to be told several things:
printer name: lw1 printer model: hpjet printer port: tty04
Flags are used for each of these, and the result is a command line that looks like this:
# /usr/lib/lpadmin -plw1 -v/dev/tty04 -mhpjet
Once the command is executed, the hpjet model file is copied to the interface directory. The system now knows that requests for lw1 will go to /dev/tty04. A printer created this way, however, will not be enabled and will not accept requests, so the enable and accept commands will have to be used separately. Contrast this to the BSD lpr system, where lpc would have taken care of both the accept and enable instructions. The AIX Spooler System for IBM RISC/6000s AIX is "POSIX compliant," so it looks like UNIX to its users, but administrators soon see that the AIX printer spooler system is only a "work-alike" printer spooler system that barely resembles lp and lpr. AIX systems can spool to remote AIX and BSD sites, but an AIX system cannot remove a job from a BSD queue (a known bug). Actually, AIX has a complex and well-designed queueing and spooling system in its own right. The queueing system can queue anything that can be programmed, but in order to make the queueing sytem print, you use a "front end" called enq. IBM made several front ends to keep users from complaining about a strange printer system:
1) qprt AIX's print front end 2) lpr lpr-like front end for Berkeley fans 3) lp lp-like front end for System V types
Each of these front ends queues the print request using enq. The system also has alternative back ends. Although enq is the main show, you also need to use the proper back end to print. Any kind of queuing job can be done by switching the back ends. The default back end for printing is piobe (an acronym for printer I/O back end). The AIX printer spooler daemon for the queuing operation is qdaemon, which is similar to BSD's lpd or System V's lpsched. While we are dealing with similarities, lpr has printcap and the IBM printer configuration file is qconfig. It is similar in purpose to BSD's printcap, but it structures the entries with stanzas. We will look at a few shortly. The Printer Front Ends When you work on AIX, you are constantly reminded that IBM didn't worry about making AIX palatable to administrators. Users see a familiar interface; lp and lpr are used as you would use them on System V and Berkeley systems:
lpr -P lw1 foo lp -dlw1 foo
Similarly, the AIX printing command qprt is almost intuitive if you know lpr:
qprt -P lw1 foo
The queuing command, enq, can be used for printing as well. Its syntax is close to qprt's:
enq -P lw1 foo
Printer Control Under AIX, users can cancel all their print jobs with qcan
qcan -P lw1
or a single user job with the job number
qcan -x 243
However, as root the administrator can cancel all jobs
qcan -X
But before you cancel anything, check the status of the queue with qck:
qck -P lw1
Then check the status of the spooler with qstatus
qstatus -P lw1
The session in Listing 6 shows where to find qstatus and includes sample output. The key word READY tells you that the print job is active and ready to print. /etc/qconfig AIX supplies a printcap-like function without printcap. The configuration file for the AIX queuing system, qconfig, is made up of structures called stanzas. Figure 1 contains a few of the keys to these stanzas. Figure 2 shows a few lines from a typical qconfig. qdaemon qdaemon, the queue daemon for AIX printing and queuing, is always active. Listing 7 shows how to filter the qdaemon entry from output. Like BSD's lpd and System V's lpsched, qdaemon takes requests from enq and passes them to piobe. piobe The print job manager and back end is the spooler back-end program called by qdaemon. qprt has dozens of options for print control (such as font size) that it passes to piobe. piobe is interesting because it runs in debug mode, using different data types such as ASCII, pass through, and PostScript. It can even invoke filters. Printer Security Because AT&T anticipated the move to C2 security, its lp spooling system has always been set up as privileged commands with root ownership removed from the lp system. A non-human user, lp, owns the tools and files. This allows another level of privilege (and responsibility) besides root or non-root users. Thus, when a problem like a printer jam is experienced, the queue and the printer are shut off from the world with reject and disable, set up as privileged commands. To get around the problem of a user having a jam and not being able to do anything but helplessly watch the lp-spool daemon die, you can give the lp password to trusted users and educate them to do their own lp administration. Keep It Simple I hope this overview of printers and UNIX printer spoolers helps you understand why it is wise to learn all three printer spoolers as thoroughly as possible. But even when you have prepared for everything and think you know most of the answers to whatever printer problem will come up, things can still go wrong. For example, even though today's laser printers are almost indestructible, at one time, my laser printer started to rumble like a washing machine on spin dry with a couple of bedspreads on the same side of the drum. As soon as I heard that ominous rumbling sound, I powered off the laser printer, and using lpc, stopped the printer queue and disabled the print server. I called for service, and after a while, a replacement was delivered. Not even stopping to think, I took out the cartridge from the faulty unit and put it in the replacement printer. To my embarrassment, the new printer made the same noise, telling everyone about the problem identification I should have done but didn't. The bottom line: Keep it simple. I should have changed the cartridge first.
About the Author
Bruce H. Hunter is the co-author, with Karen Hunter, of UNIX Systems, Advanced Administration and Management Handbook (Macmillan: 1991).
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