[Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#489216: cupsys: Turning off printer hangs system.

[Andrew Vaughan]

Package: cupsys
Version: 1.2.7-4etch3
Severity: important

Hi

Turning off my laser printer (connected via parallel port) effectively hangs 
my home server.  Whilst hung, the system will respond to pings (reply times
in the 20-30 ms range, verses a normal < 0.2ms response), but running jobs are 
effectively hung (top on the console failed to update for over 5 min, keystrokes 
on the console are processed at a rate of about 1 per sec), and I can't logon 
either locally (login via console timed out after 60 sec, but without ever 
showing the password prompt) or remotely via ssh.  Turning the printer back on 
returns the system to normal.  Stopping/restarting cupsys does not clear the
problem.  

The only relevant line in the cups error log appears to be:
E [04/Jul/2008:13:51:47 +1000] [Job 232] Back-channel read error - Input/output error!

Nothing relevant in syslog or daemon.log.

kern.log shows "kernel: lp0: ECP mode" once for every print job.

I did power cycle the printer in the middle of a print job when the printer 
started to print garbage, but have since printed the document successfully. 

This system was recently upgraded from an old Pentium II to a newer Pentium III
by simply moving the hard disks.  This is probably the first time I have printed 
since the upgrade (and hence the first time the printer has been turned on).

The old system didn't exhibit the hang when the printer was turned off.  I'm 
hoping that changing the bios parallel port settings might fix the hang locally,
but cups / the kernel should be fixed to prevent this problem regardless.

I haven't (yet) tried to reproduce the problem after a reboot.  I will send a 
follow-up if I can narrow down the cause/reproduce this.  

Thanks for your work on Debian.

Andrew V.



-- System Information:
Debian Release: 4.0
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.6.18-6-686
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)

Versions of packages cupsys depends on:
ii  adduser             3.102                Add and remove users and groups
ii  cupsys-common       1.2.7-4etch3         Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  debconf [debconf-2. 1.5.11etch1          Debian configuration management sy
ii  gs-esp              8.15.3.dfsg.1-1etch1 The Ghostscript PostScript interpr
ii  libc6               2.3.6.ds1-13etch5    GNU C Library: Shared libraries
ii  libcupsimage2       1.2.7-4etch3         Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  libcupsys2          1.2.7-4etch3         Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  libdbus-1-3         1.0.2-1              simple interprocess messaging syst
ii  libgnutls13         1.4.4-3+etch1        the GNU TLS library - runtime libr
ii  libldap2            2.1.30-13.3          OpenLDAP libraries
ii  libpam0g            0.79-5               Pluggable Authentication Modules l
ii  libpaper1           1.1.21               Library for handling paper charact
ii  libslp1             1.2.1-6.2            OpenSLP libraries
ii  lsb-base            3.1-23.2etch1        Linux Standard Base 3.1 init scrip
ii  patch               2.5.9-4              Apply a diff file to an original
ii  perl-modules        5.8.8-7etch3         Core Perl modules
ii  procps              1:3.2.7-3            /proc file system utilities
ii  xpdf-utils [poppler 3.01-9.1+etch4       Portable Document Format (PDF) sui
ii  zlib1g              1:1.2.3-13           compression library - runtime

Versions of packages cupsys recommends:
ii  cupsys-client         1.2.7-4etch3       Common UNIX Printing System(tm) - 
ii  foomatic-filters      3.0.2-20061031-1.2 linuxprinting.org printer support 
ii  smbclient             3.0.24-6etch10     a LanManager-like simple client fo

-- debconf information:
* cupsys/raw-print: true
* cupsys/backend: ipp, lpd, parallel, socket, usb