HP OpenVMS Systems

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HP DeskJet 1600 CM on VMS?

The Question is:

Dear OpenVMS Wizards, Are there any known products or methods to communicate to a HP DeskJet 1600 CM printer from an OpenVMS alpha system. My preferance would be to hang the printer off of a TCP/IP network through the printers network port. I have found drivers for this printer for Unix, Windows, Mac, etc but nothing for OpenVMS.

The Answer is:

Well, the laserjet has LPD support and support for "telnet" printing. You have to decide which one you want to use. When you say, "VAX is uing the latest release of TCPIP." I assume you mean UCX (aka. TCPIP Svc's...). If you do then you can either set up an LPD queue pointing to the laserjet or a telnet symbiont print queue.

Most customer with laserjets are using the telnet symbiont. Setting the queues up is easy and is in the documentation. On your INIT/QUEUE statement you need to do /PROC=UCX$TELNETSYM and /ON="host-name-of-laserjet-printer:portnumber". To clarify the value of the /On qualifier, it takes two parameters separated by a colon. The first is the DNS name of the laserjet (or the IP address of the laserjet) and the second is the port on which the laserjet is listening. You need to find out from HP what port to use but I seem to remember that 9001 is the telnet printing port.

Depending on the type of printing you need to do (postscript,landscape...) you may need to create a device control library with setup modules and or reset modules to get exact results you want. At this point HP doesn't supply this stuff for VMS and so the customers I have dealt with are all rolling their own. We have just received a laserjet here so at some point (hopefully in the near future) we will be going through this exercise after which time we will have better info.