Getuserattr lpd Error and Can't Print?

[Mike Jordan]

In the middle of the day today I started getting calls that none of the
print jobs that had been sent to the printers was printing. The first
thing I did was make sure the printers were enabled. They were. The next
thing I did was send a test file to a few of t he printers using the enq
-c command. It printed to the printers just fine. I checked for disk
space, thinking my /var directory or /tmp directory had filled up. They
were fine. I took a look in the /var/spool/qdaemon and found a whole
bunch of files waiting to print.

So I went into our point of sale software and tried to send a report from
there to the printer. When I did, I got the following error message:

Now printing report - Please wait getuserattr lpd : A file or directory in
the path name does not exist.

I started looking but couldn't find anything out of wack with the
environment path statements. I read the man pagaes on getuserattr but
that didn't shed any light other than it has to do with reading the
user database. I tried finding the file getuserattr but there doesn't
seem to be one on my RS6000 except for a getuserattr.htm file in the man
directory. So I don't know if this is an actual file or part of something
else.

I've called the support people on the point of sale software, but they are
all at a user conference (at least their main support people are) so I
don't know how long before they get back to me.

I've rebooted the RS6000 twice and the lpd daemon starts up like it
should. I'm running AIX 4.3.2. The only thing I was doing about the same
time this happened is I was working with the Samba config file trying to
give Samba access to a usser. I was working with the Samba SWAT program
in my browser and the smb.conf file. I don't believe I was doing anything
that would affect the print ques, but you never know.

If anyone has an idea what the error message is telling me, or have any
other ideas, I'd sure appreciate it.

Thanks

Mike

--
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Hillsboro, Oregon
Bouvier des Flandres - Herding & Working Dogs
http://www.europa.com/~mjordan - Pictures & Info on Bouviers

[Jon Shelley]

It sounds like the user "lpd" is missing from /etc/passwd. Cut and paste the
lpd line from a system that is working.

Jon

In article <3bc67...@news.nwlink.com>, Mike Jordan

[Mike Jordan]

Jon Shelley <jshe...@nospam.nc.rr.com> wrote:
: It sounds like the user "lpd" is missing from /etc/passwd. Cut and paste the

: lpd line from a system that is working.

Hi Jon,

After a lot of searching and asking questions, I found out that the passwd
file permissions had been changed. Once they were changed back to what
they had been (I did a restore of /etc into another directory and did a
file by file compare) the print jobs started printing
again. Unfortunately, the 600+ files already in /var/spool/qdaemon did
not print so I had to create a script that would read the file name and do
a lpr command with that file name.

I'm not sure what changed the permissions though. I was working in Samba
during that time frame, trying to find out why Samba does not recognize
one of my users. I had changed several of the Global security parameters
and I'm wondering if that didn't affect something in the passwd file.

Thanks for the suggestion. You were on the right file.