printers.conf file truncated when adding new queue

[John Donovan]

We had our first production problem yesterday after over 5 years using 
CUPS.
Currently, we are using cups-1.3.7-26.el5_6.1 on RHEL 5.7 i686 VM (VMware 
ESX 4).
We were adding a new queue using the web console on FireFox from MS 
Windows 7 workstation. 
Everything was normal, after the model/driver screen prompted for user/
password.  Apparently, we fat-fingered the password as LDAP failed (per 
syslog).
We entered the information again, from beginning.  This time, the login 
was successful, but the screen remained blank... did not go to the 
options screen.
We discovered that the printers.conf file had been truncated after the 
entry for the new queue.  About 2/3 of the 456 entries in the 
printers.conf file had disappeared.
All of the files in /etc/cups/ppd were present, including the new print 
queue.  Needless to say no one could print to those missing queues.
We restored the printers.conf file and added the new queue successfully.
Going forward we are using command line to perform print queue 
maintenance.  This includes making a copy of the printers.conf files 
before and after the queue maintenance in addition to nightly backups.
But, other than the LDAP failure, we don't see any other errors that 
explains why the printers.conf file would be truncated.
Have you experienced this or have some insight as to why this would 
happen? 

Thanks,
:-)





-- 
John Donovan