Re: [NTLK] I can't get netatalk talking - Oh yes I can...!

From: John Ruschmeyer (jruschme_at_mac.com)
Date: Thu Mar 14 2002 - 10:05:32 EST


Karel Jansens wrote:

> Ladies and gentlemen,
>
> It gives me great pleasure to announce that I can now use the capacities of
> my LaserJet 4 to the full, using Linux and Ghostscript as my middlemen.
>
> Nice 600 dpi PostScript printouts are positively streaming from my Newt and
> amaze both friend and foe.

Congrats. I remeber the "fun" doing this on my old NetBSD system (only
to a Canon BJC6000... Color PS is kind of fun from the Mac :-). Not easy.

What did you have to do to get Ghostscript to work as a filter for lp
(or is this CUPS?)?

>
> The trick was a minor change to my /etc/atalk/papd.conf file:
> the line which read
>
> :pr=|/usr/bin/lpr -Plp:\
>
> should have been
>
> :pr=|/usr/bin/lpr:\
>
> which sends the spool to the default printer (and in my case, the only one).
> It seems that SuSE 7.2 does not install a Plp-queue (which, funnily enough,
> S.u.S.E. 5.3 did by default).

I thought that the '-P' parameter said what printer to print to. In this
case, it seems more like lpr would not just default to the 'lp' queue.

>
> If there is anybody else with a SuSE box struggling with ethernet printing
> (but I cannot imagine that there would be another living soul as stupid as
> me), I'll be glad to give some pointers.
>
> One problem remains, and I cannot explain it:
>
> although netatalk announces itself as starting and running in the background
> at bootup, I still have to activate it manually from a console (or X-term)
> with the command
>
> /etc/rc.d/atalk start
>
> followed by _at_least_ five instances of
>
> nbpklup
>
> before all the netatalk services (AFPServer, netatalk, Workstation and
> LaserWriter) announce their presence. Probably simply waiting for a minute or
> so would have yielded the same result, but by now it should be well
> understood that sitting still patiently is not one of my skills.
>
> I can live with that, but I'm not sure if this does not bode further doom
> down the road.

I wouldn't worry about it. This seems like the same behavior I've seen
on every other platform where I've run Netatalk. I suspect that it has
something to do with the way an AppleTalk network does network discovery.

> I would like to add one last comment about the Newton and Linux mini-howto:
> the faq advises to reboot after every change to the config files of netatalk,
> but I found that, on my box at least, a simple
>
> /etc/rc.d/atalk restart
>
> would do just fine. Maybe this advise is for older kernels. As usual, YMMV.

I can't speak for older Linux kernels, but I've run various versions of
netatalk on Solaris (2.5.1?) and NetBSD. Depending on the platform, you
*can't* restart netatalk. If you do, you'll end up having to reboot
since the kernel will panic. (At least it used to on older versions of
Solaris.)

<<<john>>>

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