Last Wednesday was my last day at work before a long weekend with my kids, who were home on spring break. At the end of the day I was scrambling to print out a product specification sheet to sign off on and return to the vendor before I left. I printed the document from MS Word to my Novell Netware server running iPrint and heard beeeeep… The signal of death from a Netware box.

I looked over and the cluster node it was on had abended in Apache2 with the LibC module being the culprit. These kinds of flaky things happen occasionally, so Power cycled the box (it hard locked, not letting me even write an abend log before restart) and waited for iPrint to roll ove to another node in the cluster. When it did, I printed again. Same result…. beeeep… Another cluster node bites the dust. Now I was pissed. This obviously wasn’t some corrupt PostScript font or something. I took the Word document and made it into a PDF, thinking this would clean up any funky code or fonts in the doc, then I tried to print it back to the original server that had now come back up and got iPrint running again… beeeep… ARGH!!

I lost patience and called the vendor to fax me the sheet so I could leave and took off for the long weekend convinced it was still some sort of document problem. Well today I had to print something for the first time this week and guess what… Crash and hard lock again on a different document. Now it was a apparent that it was a bigger issue so off to the Novell support website I run off to while servers reset themselves. What do I find but two TIDs on this issue.

• NetWare 6.5 server ABENDs in LIBC and Apache2 on iPrint server
• Unable to install iPrint printer from Macintosh workstations

The first TID explains that the recent Apple Security Update 2008-002 introduced problems with printing to iPrint servers, namely Abending and crashing the server. It offers patches to fix the Abend problem. The second TID explains that while the Abend problem can be alleviated, once applied the patches break the iPrint client’s ability to add printers to the computer from the browser and they need to be manually added through the Printer preference pane. This defeats most of the purpose of iPrint.

I’ll try to call Apple when I have a minute to see what they have to say about it.

To top it off, while trying to get this issue tracked down, I discovered that My tape jukebox is reporting an error… another problem for another day.