Re: Printing via LAN fails - SOLVED

[Anthony Campbell <ac@acampbell.org.uk>]

On 20 Sep 2005, Antonio Rodriguez wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 20, 2005 at 07:01:15PM +0100, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> > On 20 Sep 2005, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> > 
> > After some more googling I found someone else with the same problem. It
> > was due to the -s switch on lpd, which is added by default by Debian.
> > Removing this has fixed it.
> 
> Would you kindly post a detailed description of what/how you did it?
> Thanks.
> 
> 

If you do ps ax | grep lpd you will  probably find /usr/sbin/lpd -s. You
don't want this switch for remote printing.

>From the lpd man page:

          Traditionally, lpd would not use the output filter for remote printers.

     -s      The -s flag selects ``secure'' mode, in which lpd does not listen on a TCP socket
             but only takes commands from a UNIX domain socket.  This is valuable when the
             machine on which lpd runs is subject to attack over the network and it is desired
             that the machine be protected from attempts to remotely fill spools and similar
             attacks.

I therefore went to /etc/default.lpd and commented out "OPTIONS="-s".
Then I restarted lpd (/etc/init.d/lpd restart). 

I think you could also use the -b switch, which might be more secure
(see the man page for lpd).

Anthony

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