MANSFIEL@EMBL.BITNET (Niall Mansfield) (06/15/87)
Summary
We want to access a DEC Printserver 40 from Sun
workstations. Are there any problems?
Detail
We want to access the printer across the Ethernet
both from VMS VAXes and the Suns (running Sun OS
3.3). I recall someone (from Project Athena, I
think) saying that to get the PS40 working from a
Unix machine they had to do a lot of work, some of
it requiring inside info from DEC.
Does anyone know more about this? What software
would be needed on the Suns - would we need Sun's
Decnet stuff?
(Posted to both Info-PostScript and Laser-Lovers - apologies
for any duplicates).
Thanks in advance,
Nialldavid@varian.UUCP (David Brown) (06/26/87)
In article <8706241909.AA14049@brillig.umd.edu>, MANSFIEL@EMBL.BITNET (Niall Mansfield) writes: > We want to access a DEC Printserver 40 from Sun > workstations. Are there any problems? > This is not exactly what you want, but here we can access printers on our VMS machines from our UNIX machines through DECnet -- we run DECnet/Ultrix on our VAX 750. I don't know if Sun's DECnet will let you do the same, plus you would need a VMS machine to drive the PS40. Here's a brief summary: (our VMS machine is named LIMSDM::) Use "dcp -P" to print from Ultrix to VMS Add to /etc/printcap on the Ultrix machine: lpvms|line printer on VMSNODE:: via DECnet:\ :lp=/dev/null:\ :of=/usr/local/lib/lpvms:\ :sd=/usr/spool/lpvms: If you have other BSD Unix machines, add a remote lpr entry to their printcaps. This is /usr/local/lib/lpvms (an executable shell script): #! /bin/sh FILE=prt$$ DIR=/tmp cat > $DIR/$FILE dcp -P $DIR/$FILE vmsnode::$FILE drm vmsnode::$FILE rm $DIR/$FILE -- David Brown (415) 945-2199 Varian Instruments 2700 Mitchell Dr. Walnut Creek, Ca. 94598 {ptsfa,lll-crg,zehntel,dual,amd,fortune,ista,rtech,csi,normac}!varian!david
butcher@G.CS.CMU.EDU (Lawrence Butcher) (07/09/87)
I used the SUN Decnet software to snoop the Ethernet packets sent between a VMS machine and the DEC Printserver 40. I guessed enough about the protocol to write a program to spool from the SUN to the printer via LPR. I did not discover what happens when there are exceptional conditions in the printer. The software will not survive changes that DEC makes to the printing protocol. I do not look inside Postscript files for structuring info. I wrote this bare-bones program simply to print my own Postscript documents directly from the SUN. I will send this (horrible hack) software to any programmer willing to improve it. The program could be converted to run under ULTRIX. The LPS40 is a complicated and polished product. It prints at a furious clip. The printer contains a microvax with lots of memory and no local disk. DEC provides VMS software to boot the machine over the Ethernet. Our LPS40 has never broken, but I assume that DEC field service would want to download diagnostics from a VMS machine. DEC's VMS spooling software gets interesting messages about printer status back from the LPS40. Without detailed documentation of the printing protocol it would be impossible to duplicate the quality of DEC's supporting software. Our printer is booted and managed from a VMS microvax, and most of our users spool thru the VMS machine. Lawrence.Butcher@g.cs.cmu.edu [[Editor's note: Anyone interested in this should contact Lawrence.Butcher directly. --Rick ]]