Urgent Fix/Problem With Printing

[papowell at astart.com]

I am the developer of the LPRng print spooler - and also do
print spooling systems in general.  I was made aware of the following
issue with Samba -

> Patrick and LPRng list readers,
> Well, put another stupid (or at least dangerous) misconfiguration on
> your list of things for which to check when whacko things start to
> happen. Here goes the explanation:
>
> As I said, we use samba to spool most of our print jobs to our various
> print servers, and upgraded samba at the same time that we upgraded
> LPRng and ifhp. In the course of the changes to samba from our old to
> our new version, there has been a change in the way that samba spools it
> files. Instead of using the old machine_name.five_seemingly
> _random_characters name, it now uses the name of the file that it gets
> from the Windows desktop. Guess how common names like, oh, say,
> "Microsoft Word - Document 1" or "IMAPmailsrv1.mitre.orgfetch" are?
> That's right, common enough that they get stepped on by someone else
> printing while they are being spooled. Which is what was happening in
> our case. Samba does not, by default, use separate paths for the spool
> directory of every printer. On our systems, it now does.
>
> Here endeth the saga of the Mystery Print Jobs. I would like to thank
> Patrick for all the help he provided in trying to track down what was
> going on with LPRng when in fact nothing was.
>


There is clearly a problem if this is the general technique.

Now,  I understand why a file would be put into the
spooling 'hold directory' with such a name,  as it would
make looking for user jobs simpler.  But there is clearly
a problem here.

I hate to admit this,  but I am baffled at a good solution.
The following have come to mind:

a)  Use the 'magic id' of previous releases.

    Negative:  difficult/impossible for users to identify their
    jobs.

b)  Add a 'majic cookie' to the end of the file name to
    make it uniq.  This is easy to do if it is the printer queue
    name.

    Negative: longer job name.

Patrick Powell                 Astart Technologies,
papowell at astart.com            9475 Chesapeake Drive, Suite D,
Network and System             San Diego, CA 92123
  Consulting                   858-874-6543 FAX 858-279-8424 
LPRng - Print Spooler (http://www.astart.com)