UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I am in the process of writing an application to track parcels across a range of European Countries - some have GPRS and some dont.

I can connect to the Unix Server - which will be running SCO Openserver 5.0.7 or later - via GPRS ebabled scanners or via the clients existing VPN and TELNET. Looking at the patchy GPRS rollout in Bulgaria Slovenia etc I think I favour the VPN route for everyone.


I'm OK with the VPN side but will I be able to print via TELNET - or do I need a particular version of it ???

Thanks in anticipation
Richard

I'm confused. If you telnet into a host you create a process on that host. If you create a process with 'normal' user privileges(not a restricted shell in other words), it can do whatever the user can do. The user should be able to execute lp ....

If this isn't right you need to give us more information.

If you mean that you're telnetting in from a client, and would like to print your telnet session transcript locally then yes, you can use a decent telnet/ssh client such as PuTTY, log the session, and then print that locally. Say you want to print a file, you could just cat, then copy the selected part out of the telnet session transcript and print it locally.

If that's not what you mean, I'm confused too!

We use PPTP tunnels via GPRS at work (this is Windows though, with Citrix) - we also allow telnet into our HP-UX box via the PPTP connections - and using the logging method described our users can print pretty much everything. We also have another telnet client (TinyTERM) that allows them to do full screen dumps to the locally attached printer.

Cheers
ZB

Thank you both for replying.

Zazzybob is on right lines - sorry I was a bit vague.

I need to print locally to the client via a telnet session. The screen dump seemd to be the way to go.

Can I script this so that the user doesnt have too complicated a process to follow. The users are from a variety of countries, companies and capabilities and as such I would ideally prefer a single button operation.

If you can point me in right direction I would be very grateful. In the meantime I'll download tinyTERM and puTTY.

Thaks Again
Richard

With TinyTERM it's as easy as going Edit | Screen Print (or two clicks along those lines) from the menus. Unfortunately, I think it's only available for Win16, so it's a bit of a CPU hog (that'll be ntvdm - bah!) on Win32 systems. I believe it's published by Century Software.

Cheers
ZB