I'm having a problem with a printer set up that was configured by a previous employee, can't figure out what he did. This is running on RHEL 5.3.

This is what it looks like is happening - we have a print job coming in from a mainframe that is outside our network - the print job is coming in on port 23 (telnet) rather than port 631. There is only one printer configured on the server and it is set up to print out to a file when it comes in. That is somehow sent over to a pipe, and then another application is notified by the same job that sent the print job in from the mainframe that there is a print job waiting in the pipe to be printed, the app picks up that job out of the pipe and prints it.

If I try printing from the command line or from the printer configuration GUI I can see all the files getting created - there is stuff printed in /var/log/cups/access_log and error_log. The print file goes to /var/spool/cups/c0####. It ends up in the pipe and if I cat the pipe file I can see what I tried to print (I have no idea how it is going from the spool directory to the pipe).

The print file that is coming in on port 23 doesn't show up anywhere. I would guess that there should be something that would be picking up whatever is coming in on 23 and redirecting it to CUPS, but I can't figure out what that would be.

Has anyone here ever seen a print system configured this way? I have no idea how to get this working again. I've tried rebooting to see if I could get whatever might need to be running up again, but no luck. And restarted cupsd a bunch of times. This has certainly worked in the past, but I don't know how.

thanks for any suggestions!

This can be done using a script involving 'inotifywait' that watches for the creation of the incoming file, then performs some action. For an example of using inotifywait look at this post. http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...8/#post4235413