zweig@ida.org (Johnny zweig) (05/31/90)
Sitting in my office are a Mac II, a LaserWriter and a Sun 3/60 workstation. Right now, the Mac is hooked to the LW's localtalk port, and the Sun to its serial port. We use the dip-switch to select which machine gets to talk to the printer. Sigh! It seems like it would make more sense to have the Mac talking to the spare serial port in back of the Sun, have a daemon that took stuff off there and spooled it to print when the Sun feels like it -- the daemon just needs to act like a LaserWriter to the serial port and then lpr stuff it receives. This no messing around with dip-switches and everybody takes their turn. Is such a setup feasible? More important, has anyone written such a daemon? I know of a daemon that pretends to be an EtherTalk LaserWriter (we run it "back home"), but don't know how much harder/easier such a beast for the serial port would be.