Remote print spooling ultrix -> vms (decnet)

[Schilperoort J.W.]

doelz at urz.unibas.ch writes:

>> In article <1990Jul17.161156.5886 at portia.Stanford.EDU>, kocks at jessica.stanford.edu (Peter Kocks) writes:
>>> several vms machines (also with decnet).  I would like to have the
>>> ultrix machines use the printers attached to the vms machines.  My
>>> question is how to get vms to allow print spooling from a specified
>>> list of ultrix machines?

>a) Use the copy command of ultrix (dcp) to copy a file on the LAT device. 
>Our lasers are attached to LAT in a spooled terminal queue, so 
>% dcp file node::ltaxxx: 
>will do the job.

>c) look for a lpd port. If you found one, let me know. I'm very much 
>interested!


In the days that LAT-printing caused our Ultrix machine to crash 
regularly (Ultrix 2.0 & 2.2) and PostScript-printers were not supported
(Ultrix could not read from a LAT printer) I made up a hack for printing
on VMS-queues. It uses a) but from the Ultrix side it looks like c).
If anyone is interested I can mail/post the sources.

The solution is roughly as follows. I have written a lpd-filter that 
performs the DECnet-copy, looks up the node/queue in /etc/printcap and 
activates a DECnet object on the VMS-node to perform the printing.
In /etc/printcap there are two extra entries for specifying the node/queue. 
The lpd-filter must be called using a unique name indicating its printcap 
entry name, so it can look up the extra entries (I have links with names
dnetf_101, dnetf_102, etc. to dnetf).


-- 
Sjaak Schilperoort          			JW_Schilperoort at pttrnl.nl
PTT Research Neher Laboratorium			...!hp4nl!dnlunx!sjaak
Leidschendam, Netherlands			schilperoort at hlsdnl5.bitnet