Panther Server: Specific Queue Name Suddenly Died

[Makosuke]

I'm pretty much stumped on this, so I'm hoping maybe someone else has a suggestion.

Got myself a nice shiny XServe running 10.3.9 Server acting, among other things, as a print server for a couple of network printers.

After weeks of working fine, suddenly one of the print queues has gone completely comatose; the printer (a Brother 5170) works fine when printing directly from the server, and the print queue shows up as expected in Bonjour, but when I send a print job from any computer (Mac or PC) it just disappears--the log shows nothing, and nothing prints.

Stranger still, it is ONLY that queue name that causes the issue; if I delete and re-add the printer, even using a different protocol, it still doesn't work. However, if I just change the queue name (add a 2 to the end, for example) using Server Admin, it suddenly works perfectly. Put the name back, and it's back to being dead.

Why on earth would one specific queue name abruptly stop working when absolutely nothing was going on with it, and can anyone suggest where I might even start looking for solutions?

 

[Makosuke]

Well, I checked the Console logs, which I should've before, so now at least I know what's happening; every time I try to print to that particular queue name, the lpd process that gets spawned crashes. Great.

Now to figure out a) Why LPD crashes with a specific queue name, and B) why it'd start doing that with no provocation.

 

[GodBless]

I've continually had problems printing on my Mac desktop. It it too bad to hear that the server edition of Mac OS X is causing problems too. I hope that Apple improves printing in Leopard for both the server and the client editions of Mac OS X.

 

[Makosuke]

First: I finally figured out how to fix the issue, though I don't know what exactly was wrong, nor why it happened. The solution, in case anybody else runs across this, turned out to be deleting the spool folder for that queue located in /private/var/spool/PrintService/. It seems that those spool folders don't get deleted (at least not immediately) when you delete a print queue, which explains why the issue was tied to the name.

The spool folder was building up a bunch of junk, and whether that's what caused the problem directly or the problem caused the buildup and only one file in there was the actual cause, deleting the printer, then manually deleting that entire folder, then letting it get automatically recreated when recreating the queue seems to have fixed the issue.

Sad that the fix ended up being so arcane; not that the average server admin shouldn't be able to figure something like this out, but it'd be nice if that kind of tinkering wasn't necessary.

On the other hand, in reference to GodBless' comments, it's worked pretty much fine for months, so I don't have a whole lot to complain about, and I'm not even running Tiger server, so it's quite possible that the whole process has already been improved even before Leopard.