-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I have had a situation where several printers have been served by up to 4 different spoolers (Apple IP share, LPRng, Windows TCP/IP and some other unix lpd thing). And no, it does not always work very well!
All my printers in this situation are HP with JetDirect cards, and print jobs don't often get lost or corrupted, but the problem appears to be with who the print chooses to listen to. I have not investigated far as I only control the LPRng spool so everyone else can go away, but it appears that it's a first come first served basis for which spooler connects to the printer first. The printer will then service all jobs from that spooler, wait a bit, and the talk to the spooler that manages to poll it next. Tough luck if you have one job in the LPRng queue, but there are a days and a half's worth of printing in the Apple queue, and it gets in first! The exception appears to be the direct printing from the Windows spooler which appears to takes priority over the other queues (we only let techs print this way). David Challenor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Senior Computer Technician Coventry School of Art and Design Coventry University - -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:owner-lprng@;lprng.com] On Behalf Of Toby Blake Sent: 01 November 2002 10:04 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: LPRng: 2 print servers both spooling to one physical printer > It is a bad idea for the same reason a printer spooler was invented > in the first place: a printer cannot print two things at the same > time and iterleaving two printjobs isn't particular useful. This > was for a unix systems with many logged in users, each of which > needs to print something. Things doesn't change very much with > network printers and printing from multiple workstations; the > printer can still only print one thing at a time, and for that > reason having only one spooler being in charge of the printer will > ensure everything runs smoothly. All other systems will then > submit their print jobs to that spooler > instead of directly to the printer. > > For a set of spooler systems to access one single printer there > must be a protocol to coordinate that access. In the LPD protocol > there is no such mechanism. I should probably comment that I plan to operate like this for a very short period of time, basically it's a way of getting one print server to serve another print server's queues while it's being upgraded, but because of the nature of our ldap propagation mechanism (ldap is the source of the princap information) there's no way of being entirely sure which of our clients will be looking at the correct server at any one time - update propagation to clients takes up to an hour, unless manually enforced. I have run some simple experiments with two lprng print servers serving the same printer and they seem to operate OK - if the printer is busy, lprng on either machine waits until it's free, effectively queueing jobs in both print servers. Toby - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - ------- YOU MUST BE A LIST MEMBER IN ORDER TO POST TO THE LPRNG MAILING LIST The address you post from MUST be your subscription address If you need help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or lprng-requests or lprng-digest-requests) with the word 'help' in the body. For the impatient, to subscribe to a list with name LIST, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with: | example: subscribe LIST <mailaddr> | subscribe lprng-digest [EMAIL PROTECTED] unsubscribe LIST <mailaddr> | unsubscribe lprng [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you have major problems, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word LPRNGLIST in the SUBJECT line. - ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - ------- -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGPfreeware 6.5.3 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com> iQA/AwUBPcKHqtppEniwd2F3EQKvbgCg38D9euoce+eX/PpnG5g27n8DEIwAoL0K pv0gbzFwaWaMzbs7NaGg/jsr =HebI -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOU MUST BE A LIST MEMBER IN ORDER TO POST TO THE LPRNG MAILING LIST The address you post from MUST be your subscription address If you need help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or lprng-requests or lprng-digest-requests) with the word 'help' in the body. For the impatient, to subscribe to a list with name LIST, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with: | example: subscribe LIST <mailaddr> | subscribe lprng-digest [EMAIL PROTECTED] unsubscribe LIST <mailaddr> | unsubscribe lprng [EMAIL PROTECTED] If you have major problems, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word LPRNGLIST in the SUBJECT line. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
