Originally posted by: le_jawa

I have a P6 running AIX 6.1, and printing to a serial printer attached to a Cisco Async router. Every time I interact with the queue or try to print a job, I got an error saying "malformed from address". From what I've been able to gather so far, BSD's lpr (and it looks like the router is running a BSD queue) requires the server to run as root so that it can access privileged ports, which I imagine it is (I don't have access to it today to confirm that), otherwise, it throws off this message whenever a client tries to connect on an unprivileged port.

I can't see what's wrong on the AIX side to cause this. We have several other systems printing to these printers successfully, including an old RS6000 running AIX 4.2.1. If anyone knows what can be done to fix this, I'd appreciate the pointer. Everything I've read so far points to reconfiguring the BSD print server, which I don't have access to do, and since it's on a router, I'm not sure how much can be changed. Any thoughts of what I can change on the AIX side to make this work?

Thank you,
Jason
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Originally posted by: le_jawa

Ok, we got it, and I figured I'd post it just in case someone out there also has to deal with an old BSD lpd.

Here's the scoop: that old lpd requires the source port for all inbound communication (source port) to be on a privileged port (as opposed to most servers that only care about the destination port). Our printer setup is using rembak as the backend on the AIX box, so we had to pass rembak a -p to force it to send from a privileged port, instead of an ephemeral port.

So, our device queue stanza in /etc/qconfig looks something like this:

@devicenamehere:
backend = /usr/lib/lpd/rembak -p
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