don@mahendo.jpl.nasa.gov (12/20/90)
We have an ethernet TCP/IP network which includes, amongst other things, Macs and Suns. The Suns (Sparcstation 1+'s) are of course networked and are running the most recent version of SunOS. The Macs (MacIIfx, MacIIci) are running the most recent version of the Mac system. They have ethernet cards and MacTCP installed. We can telnet from the Macs to the Suns without problems. We have a postscript printer (HP laserjet III with the new HP postscript cartridge). It has both appletalk and serial interfaces. How can we share this printer between the Macs and Unix machines? That is, we want to be able to print normally from within Mac applications, and also print ascii or postscript files from the Suns via the lpr/lpd system. Ideally, the solution would not require us to have the Macs connected to BOTH an appletalk and an ethernet LAN. I believe I've seen products advertised which solve this, but don't seem to have clipped the ads... so thanks for pointers! Don Kossman, SEI Information Technology, Los Angeles ...mahendo.jpl.nasa.gov!seila!don
holdenm@stolaf.edu (Mark Holden) (12/30/90)
>From: seila!dksfr!don@mahendo.jpl.nasa.gov >How can we share this printer between the Macs and Unix machines? That >is, we want to be able to print normally from within Mac applications, and >also print ascii or postscript files from the Suns via the lpr/lpd system. >Ideally, the solution would not require us to have the Macs connected to >BOTH an appletalk and an ethernet LAN. Mt. Xinu has a line of appletalk products for UNIX boxes, in particular,K-talk, K-Spool, and A-Share. We're running K-Spool to share Postscript printers between our Suns and Macs (and PC's too, but we try to ignore them) It allows the Unix side to use any appletalk LaserWriter as a printer, allows the Macs to use any serial PostScript printer via the Suns, and provides some nice spooling for the Macs regardless of whether the printer is on appletalk or serial. We've been running K-Spool on a SLC for ~3 months, and after initial set-up its worked beautifully. There was a problem in the initial set-up caused by a problem in Sun's cc that required an updated object file from Mt. Xinu, but I would expect that this has been fixed in newer releases. Mt. Xinu was very helpful, and thanks to the internet, software fixes were in and in place in < 1 hour! Price is ~$700 ($695 *I think*) And and always: I am not connected with Mt. Xinu in any way, I'm just a satisfied customer who can now access oodles of printers from any machine on the network. As an addition matter, I believe with a little bit of hacking (minimal) and NEWSPrint, one could get this stuff to print to almost *any* printer (assuming NeWSprint support for the printer)