[cups.general] Jbase and cups and a stuck queue, hopefully someone recognizes this problem.

[Mark Krenz]

  Hi, please bear with me as this is a complicated issue involving 
obscure software.  But its a very important issue as it involves having 
to restart the machine nearly every day.  The company I work for uses 
jBase, which is a multivalue database system that has its own print 
spooling system that passes jobs onto cups via lpr.

  The system in question is having issues where every morning (except 
Monday mornings and sometimes other days) all printing stops.  The 
jspprint processes which are the spooling processes for jbase, will no 
longer pass any jobs onto cups, but cups will still accept jobs from 
outside jbase, such as from the bash command line using lpr to just send 
a simple job.

Here are the versions I'm running:
OS: RHEL 3 AS
Kernel: 2.4.21-47.0.1.ELsmp
cups-1.1.17-13.3.32
glibc-2.3.2-95.44
jBase: 3.4.10

  Now on the surface, I know this sounds like its not a cups issue and 
that jBase must be doing something wrong, but there are a few things 
that point towards cups being the issue.  Perhaps not a bug with cups, 
but something that it can't handle.  I'm trying to work towards proving 
that it is not an issue on the "Linux/Cups side".  There is another 
machine running jBase that is running the same version of RHEL, Cups, 
the kernel, etc.  and it doesn't have this problem and does even more 
printing than the system that's having a problem.

Looking through the cups logs yields nothing except that cups has 
trouble talking to some printers sometimes, but that's kinda normal.  
When the problem happens, lpr processes stay running to a few different 
queues and don't ever finish.  I've tried stracing those processes and 
it doesn't yield anything helpful as shown below:

# ps auxw | grep lpr
root     26716  0.0  0.0  6176 1832 ?        S    06:12   0:00 lpr -P 
FORINV12
root     27022  0.0  0.0  7096 2788 ?        S    06:14   0:00 lpr -P 
INVCMI
root     27083  0.0  0.0  7100 2792 ?        S    06:14   0:00 lpr -P 
FORINV2
root     27656  0.0  0.0  5912 1500 ?        S    06:19   0:00 lpr -P 
FORINV14
root     27915  0.0  0.0  7100 2792 ?        S    06:23   0:00 lpr -P 
INVENTORY2
root     28270  0.0  0.0  6428 2044 ?        S    06:27   0:00 lpr -P 
FORINV11
root     30197  0.0  0.0  5900 1500 ?        S    06:44   0:00 lpr -P 
SHLAS5
root     32002  0.0  0.0  3696  672 pts/27   S    07:04   0:00 grep lpr
# strace -p 26716
Process 26716 attached - interrupt to quit
recv(3,  <unfinished ...>
Process 26716 detached
# strace -p 27022
Process 27022 attached - interrupt to quit
send(3, "2.0h", 4, 0 <unfinished ...>
Process 27022 detached
# strace -p 27083
Process 27083 attached - interrupt to quit
send(3, " \n \n \n \n \n \n \n                  "..., 98, 0 <unfinished 
....>
Process 27083 detached
# strace -p 27656
Process 27656 attached - interrupt to quit
recv(3,  <unfinished ...>
Process 27656 detached
# strace -p 27915
Process 27915 attached - interrupt to quit
send(3, "2-HI", 4, 0 <unfinished ...>
Process 27915 detached


The lpr processes at this point have been running for about an hour.   
Does anyone recognize this problem?  Can anyone give me any clues as to 
what could be the problem or what else I should check into?

 Thank you very much,
  Mark