Erratic Printer Behavior
 

When the following command was issued by a user:

lpr -Pps1 file.ps

A print status page was printing (with 4 lines of info in a text format containing the user name, the document name etc.) but the actual document wasn't printing.

However, I just tested it though and now it works (and the user tested again and it works for her too). Any ideas why this would stop working for a while and then start again? The server was powered down for about a week for hurricane gustav and brought back up about a 9 days ago (Friday the 5th). The problem was occuring on Wednesday last week, but today I tested it and found no problem.

I'm just wondering what was going on if anyone has an idea.

was the /var partition full or close to full? depending of the ghostscript or postscript is used to spool the file may have been very large.
also check the file permissions on your /var/spool look for the SUID or GUID

Hmm, the var directory has several GB available to it. if the problem comes up again, I will ask the user if they are printing a very, very large file. Perhaps if they print the file in pieces it will work.