Thanks to all who replied.
We have decided to get the Intel NetPortExpress replaced by an
HP JetDirect.
Some of the replies:
Tom Coates <Tom_Coates_at_ENG.Trimble.COM>
I'm not the admin who handles our printers, but we have had a bit
of experience with the Intel boxes. We used them for a while, and found
them to be very buggy. Had to reset them quite often. Our IS
department continues to try to use them, despite our reservations. In
our lab we are using an ESI-2681 from Extended Systems. That has worked
very well for us.
Bill Hassell <blh_at_hpuerca.atl.hp.com>
Uhhh...the LaserJet 4m has a slot for the HP JetDirect card. Printers
can be ordered with the card installed but it is a trivial task to
add a JetDirect card to the 4m. JetDirect has software for HP-UX,
AIX, Sun Solaris and SCO Unix. And it supports lpd (RFC 1179) which
allows most Unix flavors to print just fine.
Language switching is a complicated issue...there is *NO* industry
standard on how to determine the type of language used in a print
job. The LaserJet 4m can sense Postscript as long as the first line
looks like: %!PS-Adobe or something similar. It will guess ASCII
if some of the typical PS elements are missing or rearranged.
Try the JetDirect card first.
Julius Szelagiewicz <julius_at_turtle.com>
i've been using pacific data print servers and hp jetdirect both cards
and boxes - no problems with pcl and ps files in single queue. btw, it is
NOT healthy to have multiple queues for same printer enabled. good luck,
julius
Gernot Salzer <salzer_at_logic.at>
Just in case you decide to go another way:
Recently I equipped our Laserjet 4m, which formerly hung at the serial port of
a workstation, with a print server by HP called JetDirect. The printer now is
directly attached to the Ethernet and controlled by an alpha workstation.
On startup it loads its configuration from the workstation, receives all print
jobs from there and sends all log messages to the syslog daemon on the alpha.
Dan Smith, Jr. <drsmith_at_spitfire-eng.com>
Greetings,
We have an HP Laserjet4v. We have had the HP Jetdirect card installed
in it for about 8 months now with no problems. We have 3 HP 700 series
machines printing to it along with several Windows 95 and NT users. I
have not heard of the "two queue" problem. We do not have the
Postscript option installed on the Laserjet4v, so we only have one
queue. Everyone is really happy with this setup.
Lucio Chiappetti <lucio_at_ifctr.mi.cnr.it>
Pity it cannot be converted into a network printer. We've just got a
newer network HP Laserjet. We've been used to print to all our printers
(from Sun and Alphas) as remote printers defined in the printcap, so we
bypassed all the complicated print server business in the manual, just
assigned an IP number via the front panel, and there we go.
David Warren <warren_at_atmos.washington.edu>
Why not just have a postscript queue and use /usr/lbin/ps_level1of as a filter.
I don't have one of these, but it works for other network postscript printers
(or local ones as well).
GRANDLE_at_acodbob.larc.nasa.gov <GRANDLE_at_acodbob.larc.nasa.gov>
I assume that you are asking this question for a solution on the alpha boxes.
I would suggest setting up a single queue on the alpha that will handle both
text and postscript and sent it to the intel print server as postscript
only file. This can be done by setting up two print queues on the alpha
The first is a local queue that check the input to see if it postscript
or text , if text it translates the text to postscript by use of the ln03rof
filter . This queue then redirects it output to a second queue that sends
the file to the intel print server. The catch in doing this on an alpha box
is that
1) the lpr on the alpha does not support piped filters( or I have not
been able to get the syntax correct).
2) you need a way of redirecting the output to the second queue.
Phil Farrell <farrell_at_pangea.Stanford.EDU>
You can solve this problem strictly on your UNIX system.
Make the two queues, one for PostScript and the other for text,
but give them obscure names. They will not be used directly by the
users. Create a third queue for the printer with the name that
users will use.
Sam Shaffer <sam_shaffer_at_gilbarco.com>
If you look at some of the model files that come with HP-UX, you'll
see that they fake postscript if fed plain text (wrap it in a start,
end, don't-monkey-with-this-text and send it on its way). You might replace
the current model file with one of those or incorporate the features
into the current model (first should bemuch simpler).
Don Glascock <glascock_at_ywing.mayo.edu>
As with all things, there are probably a dozen ways to solve this
problem to your liking. The way I would recommand is to create one
queue on your Unix boxes that send jobs to a central Unix box. The
queue on the central Unix box takes the text files & wraps them in
postscript using the GNU enscript package, which can make cool
banner pages and so on. If the file is already postscript, then
enscript does nothing to it.
Biggerstaff, Craig T <Craig.T.Biggerstaff_at_USAHQ.UnitedSpaceAlliance.com>
First let me say I know nothing about Intel NetportExpress print
servers, so take this with a grain of salt.
On most Unix systems I have seen, one can usually queue a Postscript
file to the ASCII print queue; the input filter (ASCII-to-Postscript
converter) on the Unix system scans the beginning of the input stream
for valid Postscript. If it finds Postscript, it will pass to the
printer unmodified.
So you may be able to use just one queue, the ASCII queue.
--
Julyan Cartwright Email julyan_at_hp1.uib.es
Computer Centre WWW http://formentor.uib.es/~julyan/
University of the Balearic Islands Tel (+34 71) 172893
07071 Palma de Mallorca, Spain Fax (+34 71) 173426
Received on Sun Nov 30 1997 - 13:58:00 NZDT