Undocumented LAT printer "feature" -- save for your records!!

[Luigi Rizzo]

In article <7832 at jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> barrett at jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU
(Dan Barrett) writes:
>
>	If you have any printers hooked up via LAT, then there is something
>you should know.  According to Ultrix Software Support, you should NEVER
>associate your very first LAT tty with a printer:  it causes unpredictable
>glitches.
>   ... details omitted

This reminds me something... when we installed Ultrix 4.0 on a
microVAX3500, we experienced a strange behaviour on the LAT printer:
after printing some lines, the printer stopped for a while, and lpq
said "sleeping for 60 seconds". Then the printer started again for a
while, stopped again "sleeping for 120 seconds", and so on, the daemon
being apparently more and more tired and doubling its sleep time after
each attempt. After several days of work being unable to solve the
problem (the Digital support wasn't able to replicate it nor it was a
known problem) I gave up and went back to Ultrix 2.2.1, which is our
current release.
	I'm not sure of which LAT tty I used, but there are good
chances that it was tty00, our first one, as I didn't use the old
printcap.  I think it's just by chance that our old (and current)
printcap uses tty01 for the LAT printer...
	Did someone else experience such a problem ?

	Luigi
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Luigi Rizzo                Brown University & Univ. di Pisa
e-mail: lr at cs.brown.edu, luigi at iet.unipi.it
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