Reminds me of a case where adding printers to print spoolers that used HP Jetadmin printer drivers would cause all printers to start spewing garbage on reams and reams of paper.
The problem turned out to be that one sysadmin thought that the printer subsystem needed to be restarted after adding a printer queue, and to do it they used `sudo su` (not `sudo su -`) to gain privileges, and they liked a BSD-ish environment, so they had `/usr/ucb` ahead of `/usr/bin` (yes, this was on Solaris).
How would that break printing? Well, those HP Jetadmin printer drivers were awful Bourne shell scripts that depended on System V echo behavior to emit escape sequences for PCL, and now you see the problem: /usr/ucb/echo did not do what /usr/bin/echo did, and failed to emit those escape sequences, leading to garbage rather than properly-formed PCL being sent to the printers.
SMF (Solaris/Illumos) / systemd (Linux) fix the problem permanently.
The problem turned out to be that one sysadmin thought that the printer subsystem needed to be restarted after adding a printer queue, and to do it they used `sudo su` (not `sudo su -`) to gain privileges, and they liked a BSD-ish environment, so they had `/usr/ucb` ahead of `/usr/bin` (yes, this was on Solaris).
How would that break printing? Well, those HP Jetadmin printer drivers were awful Bourne shell scripts that depended on System V echo behavior to emit escape sequences for PCL, and now you see the problem: /usr/ucb/echo did not do what /usr/bin/echo did, and failed to emit those escape sequences, leading to garbage rather than properly-formed PCL being sent to the printers.
SMF (Solaris/Illumos) / systemd (Linux) fix the problem permanently.