cups-lpd 1.1.x vs.a Win XP Home bug

Dear fellow merry Cups users,

this is a delayed re-post of an older posting that didn't make it
to Google due to an NNTP server error... I hope I'm not repeating
the obvious :-)


Seems that I've worked around a previously reported
issue between cups-lpd and Windows XP Home.
The issue presents itself by the following line in the system log
(and by the fact that nothing ever gets printed):

Nov 26 10:32:29 linuxserver cups-lpd[29434]: Error while reading file
- Numerical result out of range

The "Generic Network Card" printer port driver in XP Home
in LPR mode contains a bug - it sends an absurd byte count (digit
string)
at the start of the data file (print payload).
I.e., THIS IS PROBABLY NOT A CUPS BUG!

Download a simple patch from
http://www.fccps.cz/download/adv/frr/cups-lpd.patch.tgz
The tarball contains three files:
- a production patch that implements a workaround,
- a maximum debugging patch and
- a logfile produced using this debugging patch.

Apply it this way (complete with tarball unpacking):

tar xvjf cups-1.1.17.tar.bz2
tar xvjf cups-lpd.patch.tgz
ln -s ./cups-1.1.17 cups
cd cups
./configure
cd ..
patch -p0 <cups-lpd.production.patch
cd cups
make -C scheduler cups-lpd

....then either modify /etc/xinetd.d/cups-lpd to redirect it
to the new version of cups-lpd (&& /etc/init.d/xinetd restart), or
copy
the new version to the location noted in /etc/xinetd.d/cups-lpd.

The bug was hunted down on a RedHat 9 with its
original cups-1.1.17. The source tarball was extracted
from a RedHat SRPM.
The resulting patches are also verified to work on
cups-1.1.22.

This bug only affects people who print to cups in LPD mode (via
cups-lpd).
This bug does not affect people who print to cups via Samba
or via the native cups driver for Windows.

Hope this helps someone.
The mail server at easysw.com is currently down,
so I'm posting this to newsgroups to publish the fix.

Frank Rysanek


Frantisek Rysanek