petersja@handel.ColoState.EDU (james peterson) (05/23/89)
Since there seems to be a fair amount of traffic on pcnfs, I thought I'd air my gripe. We are attempting to use pcnfs as a means to share a printer (an Applewriter IINT) in our departmental offices. The office has three IBM Clones (two Zenith's and an NCR) and a Sun 3/60 running Sun OS 4.0. The PC's all use Microsoft Word, which is intended to produce the lion's share of printer output. The problem is that pcnfs seems to be exceedingly unreliable in sending printer output. The first time pcnfs is installed using the nfsconf configuration program it appears to work fine -- if the PC is then rebooted it fails. Reinstallation using nfsconf works only a small percentage of the time afterwards. Since the identical problem occurs on both the Zenith's and the NCR, it can't be machine specific (both Zenith's and NCR's run slightly different versions of DOS). My suspicion is that pcnfs has a problem printing two files in succession. Word sends out a Postscript definition file (a %! file) in advance of the file to be printed. We have attempted to duplicate the process by sending two files to the printer using the "net print" command and have managed in this way to sometimes recreate the failure. It almost seems that the net print has a bug which prevents reliable printing of multiple files. Has anyone encountered this problem, or have any suggestions for us? james lee peterson petersja@handel.cs.colostate.edu dept. of computer science colorado state university "Some ignorance is invincible." ft. collins, colorado 80523