SUMMARY - HP LJ4 and three computers

From: Andy Mitchell (afm@ufnmr1.health.ufl.edu)
Date: Sun Oct 31 1993 - 12:06:44 CST


Here's the summary to my question of a couple weeks ago. I originally wrote:

> I have an HP LJ 4m that has a Sparc2 on its serial port, a 486PC on its parallel
> port, and a Mac on its AppleTalk port. This works pretty well unless a user
> on the Sun prints a large job which grabs the printer resource - then jobs sent
> from the PC generate an error message on the PC and jobs from the Mac simply
> dissappear. Now both the Mac and the PC are on the net with the Sun, but I
> am wondering if anyone has experience with spooling print jobs on local machines
> versus setting them all up to remote print and having the Unix system queue all
> the jobs in its spooling area. I'll do it if I have to, but I want to know if I
> have any options first. Then Sparc is running 4.1.2.

The answers were mostly what I expected - get off my butt and queue all the
printers through the UNIX box. I guess I knew that would be the answer but
it was worth a shot. Here are the suggestions I received:

1) queue everything through UNIX (the Sun Workstation)

2) get a LAN card and give the printer it's own IP address. THis seems like it
might be a pretty good idea. This way the Sun (though pretty reliable) is not
the bottleneck of the print system.

3) get a 'Buffalo Box' - a piece of hardware that sits off the printer and
does buffering and queue management for the printer.

I was also told that HP has desupported (is that really a word? ;-) the LJ4m's
LocalTalk interface for anything other than a network consisting of a single
Mac. Killer. That's hardly a network then is it?

Thanks to the following for their time and replies!

kmah@DCS-Systems.COM (Kevin Mah)
mage@jimmy.harvard.edu
tjfs@tadtec.co.uk (Tim Steele)
Elmar Kurgpold <ekurgpol@Law.USC.EDU>
Jack Stewart <jack@laguna.ccsf.caltech.edu>
npc@minotaur.Jpl.Nasa.Gov (Nick Christenson, Jet Propulsion Laboratory)



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