[cups.bugs] [HIGH] STR #1928: printers.conf race condition? settings lost!

[Valentijn Sessink]

[STR New]

At one of our customers, suddenly the "printers.conf" file was empty, while
I'm absolutely positive that we didn't change anything. The setting is
plain simple: a single server with cups, standing between 10 Linux PC's
and 2 printers. As the problem of queues going off line due to printer
problems was recurring, we devised a small script that basically does
"lpstat -p" and does a "cupsenable $printer" if a printer is off line.

Now I suspect Cups not to take too much care when reading/writing
printers.conf, which (still only suspection) resulted in two processes,
one writing printers.conf and the other reading an empty config file, then
writing it back. I'm not sure of this, but I cannot think of another
reason this happened. The "priority" of this bug is high (I think), but
the reproduceability is probably zero; still, a quick check for this in
the code would be a good idea.

This happened on Linux, Debian 3.0, 2.4.19 kernel, Cups 1.1.14.

Link: http://www.cups.org/str.php?L1928
Version: 1.1.14 or older