20.2. It was working normally, then I get connection refused errors

This message usually appears when you have been sending a large number of jobs to a network printer or a remote system. The reason for this is a combination the above port 721-731 restriction and the TCP/IP timeouts. For details, see RFC1179 and LPRng, but here is a quick explanation.

A TCP/IP connection is usually specified as between srchost:srcport, desthost:destport, although in practice the order of source (src) and destination (dest) is not important.

When a connection is established, each end of the connection exchanges the necessary flow control and error control information. When a connection is terminated, each end of the connection will not accept another connection from the same host:port that was previously active for a specified timeout period, usually 10 minutes.

Some TCP/IP implementations go further: they will not allow ANY connection to be originated (via the bind() system call or API) from a port that was active, or accepted on a port that was active for this timeout period.

Now let us see what happens when we have a client program, which must originate a connection on port 721-731, connect to the server, which waits for a connection on port 515. We first try to make a connection from host:port 1.1.1.1:721 to 1.1.1.2:515. The first time that we make the connection (or the first connection) we succeed. We can transfer a file, etc., and then close the connection. When we try to reconnect from 1.1.1.1:721 to 1.1.1.2:515 we get an error such as "address already in use" or "connection refused".

Luckily, we can use port 722 to originate a connection, and we can connect from 1.1.1.1:722 to 1.1.1.2:515. We continue on, until we come to port 731, and then we need to wait for our timeouts.

SOLUTION:

It appears that most RFC1179 implementations do not check for the exact port range 721-731, but only that the connection originates from a reserved port, i.e. - in the range 1-1023. You can extend the range of ports used by LPRng by changing the

    originate_port=721 731

value in the defaults (LPRng/src/common/defaults.c) file or in the lpd.conf file. I recommend the following:

    originate_port=512 1022

This is, in fact, now the default in LPRng software. If you get the infamous malformed from address error message from your spooler, then you will have to set originate_port=721 731, and live with a delayed throughput.