On Mon, 09 Feb 1998 23:28:02 +0100,
Hauke Fath rearranged the electrons to say:
>
>This printer - is it attached to your box via serial I/O, or is it a
>network printer? I've spent days wading through the undocumented "features"
>of the Berkeley line printer suite, and one of the goodies is that
>filtering only works for _local_ printers. If you print remotely, lpd will
>happily ignore all your neat filters and never say a word...

Yep.  It's remote.  Thanks for letting me know about this, didn't see
a word about it in the printcap or lpd man pages.  I wanted to be able
to print plain text and postscript files to the same queue, w/o having
to remember to use enscript with plain text.  Oh well...

>Another one is
>that lpd wants to open the dummy device that you provide in the :lp=...:
>line _exclusively_ and fails silently if that doesn't succeed.

My dummy device is just another /dev/null mknod'ed in the spool
directory.  I picked this trick up a while back when using netatalk
on SunOS.

>The NetBSD "documentation" sucks big solid rocks on that ground; I have
>found the FreeBSD handbook (html) and the Linux printing-howto valuable
>sources of information.
>
>I wish you luck.  ;)

Thanks!  I think I'll try spooling to my Sun's print queue.  As much
as Solaris' lp stuff bites, at least it allows me to use filters
for remote printers.

>>Also, on an unrelated note, is there a disk performance benchmarking
>>tool that will compile under netbsd/mac68k?  I want to compare
>>the performance of different kernels (ncrscsi vs. sbc drivers)
>>and need something that will extensively test reading and writing.
>
>I seem to recall I ran "bonnie" years ago. "lmbench" wouldn't compile, then.
>Keep in mind that heavily exercising your disks will slow down the system
>clock considerably and take the "results" with a grain of salt or two...

Yeah, found Bonnie while doing web searches (lmbench wouldn't compile
for me either, but I stopped fooling with it when I found Bonnie).  To
eliminate the problem you're talking about above, I'm running it while
in single-user, on my /tmp partition.  I don't really believe the
numbers its spitting out at me in raw terms, but at least I can
compare them against each other.  I'm going to fool around with
increasing the buffer cache as well...

Sean

---
Sean Sweda
sweda@ibl.org                     http://www.ibl.org/~sweda
sweda@netcommandos.com            http://advantage.netcommandos.com