Diskless print server

[Jim Hague <hague@research.canon.com.au>]

I hope this is appropriate for the list.

I've recently acquired an old 386 diskless box I'm booting with Etherboot
into RH4.2 off a RH4.2 host. / is mounted via NFS from a client specific
directory on the host. /usr is mounted ro directly from the host /usr, and
/home is mounted rw directly from the host /home. I have not applied the
swap via NFS patches, so there's no swap.

After customising /etc and /var, everything seems to be working OK. I've
even configured XFree86 (slowww.....).

Well, almost everything. Printing doesn't work, which is a bit of a bugger
as I want to use it as a print server. The printer is configured correctly,
the spool directory exists with correct permissions, print jobs get spooled
into it, and the print jobs are picked up by lpd and the input filter (if)
is activated. At which point it all goes pear-shaped; when the filter tries
to read stdin, the read fails and 'file: - no read permission' (or similar)
appears on the console.

Needless to say, 'cat <queue file> | filter' works like a charm.

I suspect this is some sort of NFS artifact - surely if you didn't have
read permission on the file the open would have failed? - but I'm running
out of ideas. I even checked in case lpd was opening the spool file and
then deleting it, as one thing I know would confuse NFS, but no.

Any suggestions? Has anybody out there done a diskless RH based print
server?
--  
Jim Hague - hague@research.canon.com.au(Work),bears@cix.co.uk(Play)
Canon Information Systems Research Australia        +61 2 9805 2854