UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Thanks in advance.

I am researching if it is possible for unix (solaris) to print directly printers with IP addresses. Without adding all the ip addresses to the hosts file? There are more than a hundred printers and managing them in a hosts file would be tedius, prone to error, and time consumming. No sense in reinventing the wheel, if something already exists.

As one of the people at work (VMS shop) with a little unix experience, I have been ask to look into this question. At this time, we have a local written utility that passes the user's printer (from the user's profile in a database) and the print filename to the OS with any addition formating information. This puts updating the printer information in the users hands.

Thanks,
Deborah

long ago and far away, I was an OS test engineer for sequent computer system. my unix skills are very rusty.

It's been a long time since I had to set up a printer - last two shops I worked at used Microsoft for printers.

How do you print to the printers from VMS? Are they set up in DNS at all? If I remember, there was a UCX (or UXC?) utility on VMS to work across to UNIX. Let you learn UNIX while on a VMS system. That might help get you up to speed. It may also allow you to print from Solaris to VMS to the printer. Check the documentation (a quick search found this)

But to really answer your question - yes, the IP has to be somewhere - if not in NIS, DNS, NIS+, then the hosts file (althougth I still think UCX has a way of sharing the printers with UNIX boxes - you might only have to set up the printer locally on Solaris to point to your VMS servers).

And it seems since you have something that works....
"If it's not broke, don't fix it!"

I first email was not very clear. Our shop is looking at possibility moving from VMS to Unix sometime in the furture.

We are installing AppWorx for job scheduling and it only runs on unix, not VMS. It would be nice to have the unix box route the output jobs to users and not have to send the output back to VMS. One of the many concerns they have is what is available in unix to replace some of the locally written utilities. One of the major utilities written here is omniprint which uses a table to store the local user information such as, their default printer name and ip address. When the user runs a job with output, they have several different options for where to sent the output. We do not use the normal printer options with the software and do no have a printer queue on the VMS machine for each printer.

Hope that makes more sense.

Thanks,
Deborah

Isn't the table which stores user info (printer name and IP) the same, if not more, of a hassle? This seemed to be your complaint - It seems to me that either way, you have to manage that information. Suggest you build a database much the same way it was done on VMS and then write a local script to pull that information. This would be like rewriting your omniprint but seems to be what you are looking for.

I don't have the equipment to test printing directly to an IP from UNIX but believe it can be done (not sure formatting would be great). You could easily test this if you have the printers.

Some suggestions - take a look at CUPS and GhostView

Thank you for the feedback. Writting a replacement in Unix for our utility to replace the current one on VMS seems to be the way to go. I thought it was worth asking if something existed, no sense in re-inventing the wheel. CUPS does look like the way to go.

Thanks again.