[comp.sys.hp] Printer aliases

kelso@seas.gwu.edu (John Kelso) (03/30/90)

Greetings-

I'm trying to figure out a way to assign a printer several names, as
can be done in the BSD printcap file.  We are running HP 9000/3xx's
under HP-UX 6.5, and HP 9000/8xx's under HP-UX 3.1.

For example, on our BSD system we have several generic printer names,
such as lp, lw, lj.  The printcap file has aliases that correlate the
generic printer names with actual printer names.  In this way, when a
user prints to the device named lw, it is printed on the Laserwriter
that is physically closest to the user's workstation.

Two ideas come to mind, neither of which are anything that I'd want
to admit to in public:

1) create a printer queue for the generic printer that resubmits the
job to the proper printer.  uck!

2) create a printer queue for the generic printer that uses the remote
printing options to requeue it to the proper printer on the same
machine. ouch! (at least the banner page comes out right...)

A third idea is still pretty kludgy:
write a front-end lp program that calls the real lp with the name
of the generic printer replaced with the name of the actual printer.

Has anyone else out there tackled this problem?  Did you solve it?
How did you do it?

Thanks,

John
--
      John Kelso, System Engineer, George Washington University
     SEAS Computing Facility, 725 23rd St NW, Washington DC 20052
 	     kelso@seas.gwu.edu  -or-  uunet!gwusun!kelso
--