I received helpful replies from the following people,
thanks to all.
Barry Lynam <b.lynam_at_qut.edu.au>
Gerhard Kircher <gk_at_gkws.edvz.tuwien.ac.at>
"Paul.Casteels" <casteels_at_uia.ac.be>
Magnus.Harlander_at_physik.tu-muenchen.de
Matthias Schlett <Schlett_at_fz-rossendorf.de>
C.Morgan_at_soc.staffs.ac.uk (Craig Morgan)
Barry Lynam's reply came in first, he uses an lpd filter, but suggested
I try the plp package, available as
ftp://ftp.iona.ie/pub/plp. I ftp'd
plp, and it unpacked and built cleanly on the Alpha. This package is a
complete replacement print system, and has socket drivers to do what I
want, but at this stage I have not installed and tested it, preferring
to try a "simpler" filter-only installation.
Gerhard Kircher suggested a free program, "socket" available as
ftp://ftp.cs.ualberta.ca/pub/brock/ios_mirror/src/socket.tar.Z
I have not tried this yet.
Magnus Harlander sent me a tcp filter to try.
Matthias Schlett sent me source to another filter program, hpfilter.c.
Paul Casteels and Craig Morgan both sent me information about a filter
program called hpdriver, written by Lawrence LeMay <lemay_at_epx.cis.umn.edu>,
available from
ftp://ftp.cs.umn.edu/dept/users/lemay, which I ftp'd,
compiled, and installed.
Lawrence LeMay's hpdriver looked like the best compromise between
performance and complexity to get going quickly, although things did
not go as smoothly as they should have. I do now know a lot more about
the print system than I did before, however!
After much configuring, reconfiguring, email to Craig Morgan for help,
still more reconfiguring, I finally looked at the source, and found
that hpdriver is taking the accounting file name (last parameter
passed to the filter) and using that as a basis to build other file
names, such as the .config file log file, status file, etc.
I was using the OSF lprsetup command to add the printer entry, and
that creates spool file entries of the form /usr/spool/lpd1, but
account file (af) entries of the form /usr/adm/lp1acct
When called, hpdriver was attempting to read /usr/adm/.config, rather
than /usr/spool/lpd1/.config, and ended up dumping core, without even
writing a log entry (because of the wrong path to the log file).
When I found this, I manually changed the printcap af entry to
/usr/spool/lpd1/acct, and things started working.
Thanks again to everyone for their help,
David
David Varley
C-Born Software Systems | Voice +61-52-786530 +61-52-290144
59 West Fyans St. | AmigaFax +61-52-786355 +61-52-290248
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Received on Wed Jun 14 1995 - 10:37:42 NZST