Hi Lars,
Thanks for this detailed post! Some comments below.
Lars Tunkrans wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have been working with S10u1 Printers and JDS on Sunrays lately. Im based
> in Sweden.
>
> One of my first issues is that every printqueue and print applet
> defaults to LETTER paper
> format. I cant buy LETTER paperformat here even if I wanted to, Now I need
> to convince
> every single application and every single printerqueue that it is supposed
> to print with A4
> Paper size.
> ( The "-o media=A4" option to lpadmin is not even documented in the man
> page )
This is bad. We have this since the day we have product primary
market was North America and we suffer here in Europe :). We should
really fix this.
>
> Can Paper format become a LOCALE setting like LC_MONETARY ,
> LC_NUMERIC ?
> I need to set a GLOBAL Paper FORMAT variable or end users of JDS
> will go crazy. Or maybe GCONF can be used to hold a global paper format
> variable for GNOME.
Another way to fix this is that the applications can find out from
the printers about the type of paper sizes it have in its trays rather
than based on a local setting. Based on a locale setting means when you
bring your Swedish desktop to the U.S. or your Sun Ray session is
remotely directed to a a U.S. office, your paper size still incorrectly set.
>
> What usually happens if you send a print request to a printer with a paper
> format request
> that the printer cant satisfy , is that the printer goes offline and
> put's up a meesssage on its
> display saying " please load LETTER paper format in tray 1" and then an
> operator needs to
> abort the printrequest. ( since we dont have any LETTER size Paper here )
> This will put users off - big time.
Hmm, I thought LP spooler does some kind of e-mail notification to
the user. But may be this is not a fatal event that it send out a mail.
Wonder whether the e-mail notification can be configured to do so.
>
> Secondly, I belive the separation between the Printer admin tool and the
> tool for
> manageing the users spooled printrequests should stay like it is.
> In a Sunray environment you certainly dont want any user creating and
> deleteing
> printqueues , only the administrators are to be able to fiddle with the
> spooler otherwise a
> huge chaos would desend upon us.
Actually, I like to see all users can add 'access' to an existing
print queues to be achieved. Adding new printer queue of course should
remain the privilege of the system admin.
> I realise that the user of a workstation would like the two applets to be
> united.
> but it woud be a disaster in the sunray scenario.
>
> It could be one tool, only if spool queue creation/deletion is unlooked if
> the tool is started
> by a user that has the "printer administrator" RBAC user right/role.
>
>
> The THIN THINK blog has an article on " follow me printing " for Sunrays .
> Their solution with dynamic seeding the $HOME/.printers file with a
> printer name
> that is tied to the individual sunray unit works well.
That's one possibility that Solaris Printing supports.
>
> Its more diffucult to see how this would work in a workstation environment .
> You want to get a printer assigned dependent on which workstation you logged
> in on
> and not dependeing on you username - which you can get from NIS or LDAP.
> It will need som kind of central repository where a list will be kept
>
> Workstation name - closeset printer
There is really not 'natural' attribute to decide where is the
nearest printer, unless the sys admin devises some sort of naming scheme
to it, I think. The closet 'natural' attributes could be that the
printer IP is within the same subnet of yours IP at the time. However,
that could be a problem if you are in netmask is more than 255.255.255.0.
>
> Maybe you should be thinking of extending Sun Desktop Manager- APOC for
> this.
>
May be :)
-Ghee
