ras@sgfa.ssd.ray.com (Ralph A. Shaw) (08/11/90)
We've been having quite a bit of difficulty and runarounds from Interleaf, specifically when using Imagen printers (which are listed as supported in their documentation). I wonder if others have had these problems, or created any work-arounds that might be of use until Interleaf comes up with a viable solution. We have been using Interleaf TPS for the past few years on Sun2 and (more recently) Sun3 workstations, in conjunction with QMS/Imagen laser printers (2308 and 3320), (CX printers, to Interleaf). When using Interleaf 3.0.X on our older Sun2's, we would routinely loose jobs that were printed, especially if the printers were currently in use via the normal BSD spooler. Recently, we find the same behavior on our new Sun3 systems running Interleaf's 4.0.65 release. It looks as though the Interleaf-supplied "eicat" program (to talk to the Imagens via Ethernet TCP/IP) does not retry if the printer is busy or offline, so the jobs just go away. Dedicating an Imagen to each Interleaf workstation is out of the question. (If we had the source to this program, it would be a trivial fix). Interleaf Support's (predictable) answer after two months is that there is a special Interleaf->Imagen support software that is to be used instead of the normal Interleaf->Imagen support software that (a) fixes this problem, and (b) costs a meager $2500.00 in addition to the $15,000 for full TPS. There's gotta be a better way! Any ideas, (besides FrameMaker, that is)? -- Ralph Shaw, ras@quahog.ssd.ray.com Raytheon Co, Submarine Signal Division., Portsmouth, RI 02871
geof@aurora.com (Geoffrey H. Cooper) (08/23/90)
In article <9008222046.AA08142@crayola.cs.UMD.EDU> ras@sgfa.ssd.ray.com (Ralph A. Shaw) writes: >"eicat" program (to talk to the Imagens via Ethernet TCP/IP) does not The easiest thing to do is replace eicat with a home-brew. It is actually very simple. First experiment until you know how eicat is being called (replace it with a #!/bin/sh shell script that echos arguments to the console, for example). The IMAGEN protocol is in the TCP/IP supplement to the printer documentation. The easiest thing to do is: for (;;) { open connection to port 35 on printer if succeeds then send all data down the connection if succeeds then break; sleep for 1 minute } You can do better this with somewhat lower overhead by implementing the UDP-based status protocol. In that case, probe the printer with status packets until it indicates that it is running and accepting TCP connections, then attempt one tcp connect. But the above will certainly work well. If you implement a "netpipe" like procedure that opens a socket to port 35 or fails you can do the whole thing from a shell script. When you are done, post your code to comp.sources.unix.... - Geof -- geof@aurora.com / aurora!geof@decwrl.dec.com / geof%aurora.com@decwrl.dec.com