One reason I have read about is that there where problems with buggy
printservers that did not clear the out downloaded fonts and other
things.(especially these on a laserjet)
Setting the the filesize to something "invalid" would lead the software
to do a small soft reboot and clear up settings from the previous printjob.
A really ugly solution that could lead the unixbased printserver to
start to buffer for a 4Gb file in the worst case.....
Greg Thomas wrote:
On 12/11/05, Garance A Drosihn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
At 10:25 AM -0800 12/4/05, Greg Thomas wrote:
On 12/4/05, Steve Murdoch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> Any issues I had printing from XP went away when I enabled
> LPR Byte counting in the LPR port settings.
Any ideas why that is?
Apparently Windows (in general) does not like to keep a byte-count
for a file. It is not a saved attribute of a file, so "something"
(I don't know what) has to count the bytes. This is overhead, so it
defaults to off. I know little about windows, so that description
might not be 100% accurate.
However, I do know about unix implementations of lpd. When a file
is transferred, the remote side first says how many bytes it is
going to transfer, and it then transfers that amount of data. The
RFC for lpr implies that you can put in a zero for the length, in
which case lpd will just keep reading until the end-of-file
condition. But in fact there are no implementations of lpd for
unix which actually do that (well, none that I've noticed at least.
I guess lprNG might, I haven't checked that one). If you tell lpd
you're going to send zero bytes, then by golly it thinks you will
send a zero-byte data file.
So if you don't turn on LPR byte-counting, then these Windows
implementations will send the 'count' field to zero, which should
work according to RFC 1179, but won't in fact work with most
implementations of lpd for Unix.
Cool. Thanks for the explanation and it makes complete sense because
the queue on the server always stuck at 0 bytes. I do know that the
lpd on the little wireless print server I have doesn't require byte
counting from XP boxes.
Greg
