This is a summary to the question posted about printing from a UNIX box to
a printer attached to a PC. Some people suggested attaching all printers to
the UNIX machines and having print jobs from the PC spooled on the UNIX
machine.
This is, of course, already implemented and is not the problem. The PC is
five floors from the nearest UNIX machine. It's the walk to the printer that
is killing him. ;-)
Suggestions for printing from the Unix machine to the PC included:
(1) PC-NFS. Downside to this solution is that the PC takes a heavy
performance hit due to a large memory requirement of the print TSR program.
(2) charaon. Never heard of this. Not much info given other than it is
public domain (which is a nice bit of info in any case ;-) This has not
been tried yet, but is being looked into. It was found at ftp.uws.edu.au
(3) Lan Workplace has an LPD program. This is the one the user is trying,
though I have not heard from him as to its effectiveness.
(4) eXceed 4 has an lpd included. We will be upgrading to this soon, so this
may solve our problems. The users main appkcation is x-based and so this
would be an ideal way to bundle up the printing. I did not mention it, but
printing is to be disallowed whenever an active x-session is NOT present.
(5) Beame & Whiteside support an lp daemon. This was not investigated.
(6) Vista offers a product called eXtend which complements Hummingbird's
eXceed program. The only problem with this solution was one of security.
Proper steps need to be taken to ensure that the users PC is not left open to
attacks from outside. This solution was recommended to the user and will be
attempted if the Lan Workplace lpd proves to be flaky or inconvenient.
(7) SuperTCP from Frontier Technologies. Reported to be a very nice
implemenation though we did not try it. Allows printing in either direction
PC<->UNIX
(8) A Windows Socket LPD called, appropriately enough, wslpd.exe. Not tried,
so I don't have mcuh to report on this.
(9) One person suggested checking the NFS FAQ's. I have so many suggestions
right now that I have not had a chance to check any of these. But here they
are for those that might have the time:
seagull.rtd.com:/pub/tcpip/FAQ.pcnfs.current.Z [Unix compress]
seagull.rtd.com:/pub/tcpip/FAQ.pcnfs.current.gz [GnuZip compress]
seagull.rtd.com:/pub/tcpip/pcnfsfaq.zip [ZIP compress]
seagull.rtd.com:/pub/tcpip/pcnfsfaq.txt [Plain ASCII text]
ftp.york.ac.uk: /pub/pc-nfs/FAQ/pcnfs.FAQ
(10) Dump Windows and put linux on the PC and forget about all these other
problems. This is a very real possiblity if the user has enough disk space to
support partitioninng of his drive. He can not afford to do away with Windows
completely.
(11) SoftNet from Puzzle Systems. ~ $495.00 Say no more. With so many free
options, who would consider this? well, not me anyway. Pass.
I'm sure that we will find one of these that works. If you are interested in
knowing what I did, email me in a couple of weeks and I'll try to let you know
what we came up with. Thanks to all who responded. Your help is much
appreciated!
Thanks to:
"Haiquan Dai" <daili@csbnmr.health.ufl.edu>
"Ray W. Hiltbrand" <Ray.W.Hiltbrand@Eng.Auburn.EDU>
"ron d. parachoniak" <rap@physics.ubc.ca>
Birger.Wathne@vest.sdata.no (Birger A. Wathne)
Dan Stromberg - OAC-DCS <strombrg@bingy.acs.uci.edu>
Dave Gunter <gunter@wizard.stat.ncsu.edu>
Douglas Mackay <doug@stats.gla.ac.uk>
Narendranath Kalle <kalle@cs.wvu.edu>
Paul Cowle <paulc@alex.state.COM.AU>
Paul Walters <walters@prl.philips.co.uk>
Stewart <S.M.Doyle@computer-centre.hull.ac.uk>
Todd Pfaff <todd@water.eng.mcmaster.ca>
William York Davis <davis@cs.unc.edu>
anderson@neon.mitre.org (Mark S. Anderson)
andy cobley <acobley@mic.dundee.ac.uk>
blymn@awadi.com.AU (Brett Lymn)
crm@lgi.com (Charles Mengel - LGI - Systems Eng Mgr)
daley@eve120.cpd.ford.com (Mike Daley)
dougj@iplab.health.ufl.edu (Doug Jones)
gareth@nmr.ion.bpmf.ac.uk (Dr Gareth Barker)
garrett@athena.SDSU.Edu (Garrett D'Amore)
jlarivee@DPW.COM (Jerry Larivee)
john@pendragon.zim.bms.com (John Turner)
ncanas@solsuni.pt (Pre-Sales Manager)
penrod@whiplash.er.usgs.gov (Dan Penrod)
rao@hobbes.crc.com (Randy Olsson)
raoul@MIT.EDU
uusr656!rob@rambone.psi.net (Rob Moyer)
wolfgang@sunspot.nosc.mil (Lewis E. Wolfgang)
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