gordon@maxwell.waterloo.edu (Gordon R. Strachan) (11/13/89)
We, here at Waterloo, are running HP-UX 6.5 on a 319c+ workstation with an HP laserjet II and a HP rugged writer printer attached to it. We would like to get some way of figuring out how many pages each user has printed on each printer. This would be easy to do except, there doesn't seem to be anyway of getting either printer to tell the host how many pages it printed. Am I missing something in the manuals? Is there anyway to get either of these printers tell me when a page was printed? Barring that, is there any command that will tell the laserjet to send a status byte, id string or anything back to the host? As near as I can tell the laserjet will never talk back to the host computer. Has anyone done this sort of thing before? It seems to me it should be a very basic operation. Thank you in Advance Gordon
bcripe@hpcvlx.cv.hp.com (Brian E. Cripe) (11/17/89)
> Am I missing something in the manuals? Is there anyway to get either of > these printers tell me when a page was printed? Barring that, is there any > command that will tell the laserjet to send a status byte, id string or > anything back to the host? As near as I can tell the laserjet will never > talk back to the host computer. I seriously doubt whether you will be able to get this information back from either LaserJet or RuggedWriter. I wrote some of the firmware that is in RuggedWriter and I can't think of any trick to make this happen. (Well you could hand feed it paper one sheet at a time and catch and count the number of times it reports out of paper). I think your best bet is to do the counting on the host as it is sending the data to the printer. "wc -l" should give you a good start. Brian Cripe