[cups] CUPS filled up /tmp

Michael Sweet msweet at apple.com
Wed Dec 9 12:02:15 PST 2015


Rick,

The standard CUPS software creates temporary filenames in /var/spool/cups/tmp (or wherever TMPDIR points) whose names consist of 13 hexadecimal digits (no "cups" prefix).  If your Linux distributor (Red Hat) has changed the implementation of the cupsTemp* APIs, it is possible that they are not honoring the TMPDIR value in the environment.  However, I would suspect that a driver is responsible for creating those files (the LPD backend will create files owned by root while filters will create files owned by the lp user...)


> On Dec 8, 2015, at 6:49 PM, Rick Cochran <rcc2 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> 
> Michael,
> 
> After the fire drill required to increase the size of /tmp to prevent this from happening again, my management is interested in an analysis of what happened.  This failure caused about one hour of downtime on a production system with one of our highest printing volume times of the year coming soon.  Fortunately, all Windows printing is done through a different system, and most OS X printing has not yet migrated to this CUPS server.  Plus it happened on a Sunday afternoon.
> 
> I run a vanilla RHEL CUPS environment with no custom backends, etc.
> 
> I appreciate your expertise and good will, but I really don't see how those files could have been created by anything other than CUPS.
> 
> Yours,
> -Rick
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: cups-bounces at cups.org <cups-bounces at cups.org> on behalf of Rick Cochran <rcc2 at cornell.edu>
> Sent: Monday, December 7, 2015 12:02 AM
> To: The CUPS user discussion list.
> Subject: Re: [cups] CUPS filled up /tmp
> 
> It was PostScript.
> 
> The CUPS queues on this system send the print jobs to another server using LPD protocol.
> 
> ________________________________________
> From: cups-bounces at cups.org <cups-bounces at cups.org> on behalf of Mike Sweet <msweet at apple.com>
> Sent: Sunday, December 6, 2015 8:05 PM
> To: The CUPS user discussion list.
> Subject: Re: [cups] CUPS filled up /tmp
> 
> Rick,
> 
> Those file names don't correspond to anything CUPS would produce... What are the contents of the files?
> 
> Sent from my iPhone
> 
>> On Dec 6, 2015, at 4:41 PM, Rick Cochran <rcc2 at cornell.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> Using latest RHEL version of CUPS.
>> 
>> 
>> There are about a dozen files with names of the form "/tmp/cupsxxxxxx" where "xxxxxx" seems to be a random collection of numbers and letters.  The files have today's date.
>> 
>> 
>> Most of the files are empty, but one filled up the 8GB /tmp partition.
>> 
>> 
>> I have "RequestRoot /data/cups/spool" in cupsd.conf.
>> 
>> 
>> I don't see why CUPS should be putting any files whatsoever in /tmp.
>> 
>> 
>> To be more specific, I do not want CUPS putting any files whatsoever in /tmp.
>> 
>> 
>> Yours,
>> 
>> -Rick
>> 
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_________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Senior Printing System Engineer




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