managing print queues

From: Bob Berrigan <berrigan_at_kent.wednet.edu>
Date: Thu, 27 Apr 1995 11:43:36 -0700

Awhile ago, I sent the question below, but I didn't receive any
responses from people with similar environments. I decided to resend
it, hoping that someone who missed it would have some suggestions.

I'd like to know how people manage and set up their queues in a
production room environment. We are a VAX shop migrating to OSF and have
two high speed line printers that our OSF applications will have to access.
Users will need to print different form types (like 132 character paper,
bubble sheets, report cards, carbon copies, etc.). The operators need to
know what paper the print job requires and the print jobs must wait in the
queue until the operator sets up the paper and releases the jobs. The
only way I know to get this done in unix is to set up a queue for every
combination of printer and form type and disable the printing to each queue.
Then users would send their files to the printer with the proper form type.
The operators would have to monitor the queues, turning the printing off and
on as they change form types. We have about 20 form types for two printers
which could mean managing 40 queues for those printers plus 10 queues for
other printers. That's alot of queues to monitor with just the 'lpc status'
command. Please let me know if you know of any other ways to manage a
printing environment like this one?

I did receive responses from:

Selden E Ball Jr <SEB_at_LNS62.LNS.CORNELL.EDU>
     who sends print jobs to a VMS system and uses DECprint Supervisor
"Alex M. George" <george_at_mms.water.ci.detroit.mi.us>
     who uses different print queues with different filters
treahy_at_ix.netcom.com (Barry Treahy)
     who is also interested in the responses. He also noted that in
     unix, when a print job fails in the middle of printing, it doesn't
     pick up where it left off (like in VMS).

Thanks in advance.

Bob Berrigan
Kent School District
Kent, WA
Received on Thu Apr 27 1995 - 15:07:51 NZST

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