[wplug-bsd] FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE Printer Issues (PROBLEM IDENTIFIED)

[Bill Moran]

Benjamin Slavin wrote:
> Well, sir, I think we've found the problem.
> 
> It prints terribly slowly, but at 4k/sec, this is to be expected.
> 
> Now, to get lpd to limit itself to that speed. I assume that, since it
> spools the job to disk before printing, this buffer needs to sit between
> LPD and the printer, not between the filter and LPD. I attempted to hack
> together a simple shell script to do this, thinking that by setting
> lp=/path/to/script, the script would take the data to be printed via
> STDIN, but found that it just wrote over the file instead.
> 
> Any recommendations for this last step?

Possibly point the output filter (of=) in /etc/printcap.  That should
cause it to treat it like a script instead of writing to it as a file.

I'm not sure if the timing is such that it will work or not, though.

Additionally, while this is a good workaround, there's obviously still
a problem with the USB.  Did you manage to upgrade FreeBSD as Tom had
suggested?

> 
> Thanks so much,
>  --Ben
> 
> [Sorry to Mr. Poyner who will receive two copies of this email... I 
> accidentally sent a reply directly to him, and not to the list]
> 
> Poyner, Brandon wrote:
> 
>> It certainly sounds more and more like a problem with USB.  You might
>> want to try slowing down the stream of data going into the printer,
>> perhaps the printer buffer wigs out when it fills up completely?
>> (doubtful but I'm just grasping at straws).  You could use this perl
>> script as a pipe to stream ~4K/sec into the redirect to /dev/ulpt0. 
>> #!/usr/bin/perl -w
>>
>> use strict;
>>
>> my $buf;
>>
>> while(read(STDIN, $buf, 4096)) {
>>        print STDOUT "$buf";
>>        sleep(1);
>> }

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com