On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 05:29:12PM -0500, Jesse Marlin wrote:
Christopher Mahmood writes:
* Guy Van Sanden (sienix@crosswinds.net) [010129 03:44]:
Hello
I'm having some problems with my printer. I think it's hardware related, but I keep seeing this message appear in syslog: "lp0 on fire"
What does it mean?
It's an old Unix message--basically a wastebasket error message that something is wrong with the printer but lpd doesn't know what.
The first SLE'er that can correctly give the complete entomology of this error message gets free t-shirt or whatever tradeshow junk I can find in my desk ;)
I suspect it has some basis in reality. Perhaps printers of that age were prone to catch on fire.
Maybe an early laser printer that instead of etching on the printer drum, tried to burn the image onto the paper.
While we are swapping trivia what does 'ping' stand for? I think it is Persistent InterNet Groper.
it is ping as in ping-pong :) Best old UNIX error messages competition: Smashing the heap with malloc/free muckyness used to produce: "Corrupt arena." Or there was the program that used to have one error message: "argc=1" It was trying to tell you that the program needed an argument. etc... I have a drawer full of them ..lol Cliff I once co-authored a generic comms interface for use in application API's needed for various IPC mechanisms. If you asked for a channel to a machine it didn't know about it would return the infamous "NFHOI" protocol error. A small prize if you can work out what that means :)