Re: lp0 on fire

[dmaziuk@yola.bmrb.wisc.edu (Dimitri Maziuk)]

* David Raeker-Jordan (rkrjrdn@epix.net) spake thusly:
> I was printing a rather large label job from a local debian machine to a
> remote debian machine that has an old dot matrix printer attached to it.
> After about 10 minutes of printing to the remote printer, the message "lp0
> on fire" popped up on the remote machine's terminal and the printer stopped
> for a minute or so. The printer then continued, but the "lp0 on fire"
> message keeps coming up every several minutes along with the corresponding
> pause in printing. I did not find a similar message on the local machine.
> 
> I do not recall this message when I would attach the dot matrix printer to
> the local debian machine and use the printer as a local printer.
> 
> Any ideas what is happening? BTW, the print job came out fine.

There used to be [very] big and [very] noisy line printers that used 132-column 
tractor-fed paper. They usually lived in a separate room, together with stacks 
of paper. Sometimes paper would get stuck, printer would be hitting the same spot, 
heating it up until it caught fire. That's where the error message comes from.
It means there's some kind of printer error, but since printers usually aren't 
smart enough to report back what exactly went wrong, it doesn't know WTF happened.

Dima
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