A few months back I posted a note saying that we were having problems
with a SPARCprinter hooked up to a 690MP. The printer would work when
attached to sparcstations, but when the same printer, cable and card
were plugged into a 600MP machine, output pages would start to be
chopped off.
It appears that the bug is related to ethernet activity on the 600
series machine (possibly also SBUS activity since all ethernet goes
through SBUS, but I don't have any other SBUS cards to try in the machine
with the sparc printer).
The problem is reproducible on any 600MP with a sparcprinter by doing
the following:
% lpr <filename>
Wait for the file to start printing and type:
% rsh <host> 'cat >/dev/null' </dev/null
<filename> should be something more than a few pages long so that
you have time to start up the rsh. <host> should be a sufficiently fast
host, possibly on the same subnet, so that it provides a decent ethernet
load. Within a few seconds of starting the rsh, the sparcprinter will
start chopping off output pages, sometimes putting out completely blank
pages.
I reported this problem to Sun a few months ago, but so far no workarounds
or fixes. Hopefully they'll be able to fix this soon, but until then it's
not possible to use a sparcprinter on the 600MP and do heavy ethernet
I/O at the same time.
Sam Horrocks
ICS Department, UC Irvine
Email: sam@ics.uci.edu
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:06:50 CDT