[cups.general] The Famous "Media tray empty!" error - revisited

[Steven P. Ulrick]

Hello, Everyone :)
I just ran an experiment, and the results were very interesting.  For
the sake of (hopefully) clarity, I will describe what I found in a
numbered list.

1. Checked to see that our printer hadn't dissappeared.
2. It hadn't dissappeared, so as root, I ran "/sbin/telinit 1"  While
the appropriate services were shutting down, I saw CUPS shut down
successfully.  I then checked to make sure that CUPS was actually in the
startup sequence for runlevel 5.  It definitely was (and is)
3. I then ran "/sbin/telinit 5"  I watched the messages roll by, and I
was told that CUPS started up, in the words of the message "OK"
4. I logged into my user account (non-root) and checked to see if our
printer was there.  It was not!
5. Before I proceeded any further, I checked to see if CUPS was running.
 It was.
6. With "kcontrol | peripherals | printers" open on our monitor, I, as
root, ran "/etc/init.d/cups restart"  Please remember, before I did
this, "system-config-services" claimed that CUPS was running, and the
runlevel 5 startup sequence confirms that.
7. After entering the command "/etc/init.d/cups restart", I watched
kcontrol on our monitor, hit the enter button on our keyboard, and guess
what?  Our printer reappeared!

In summary, CUPS appears to start/shutdown correctly when
rebooting/switching runlevels.  After rebooting/switching runlevels, our
printer is "gone"  Checking to see whether CUPS is running reveals that
apparently it is.  But still, no printer.  I then "restart" a service
(CUPS) that all signs lead me to believe is actually running, and our
printer "reappears"  Do I have any idea what this all means?  No Way! :)
If you have any further questions for me, please feel free to let me
know.
As I mentioned before, our system information is contained in the
original message on this thread.  But, to clarify, the version of CUPS
that I am using is the official Fedora Core 2 released update
(cups-1.1.20-11.1)

Have a Great Day :)
Steven P. Ulrick

P.S.: I need to go to bed before I go to work later, but I will check
the above information for reproducibility.  My strong suspicion is that
it will be 100% reproducible, since everytime I've got our printer back
before, I had restarted CUPS (with no reason to suspect that it wasn't
running to begin with)