topic Re: Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer in Operating System - OpenVMS

Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

Phil Lawson — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 21:58:20 GMT

I've got a few users who have directly attached printers (USB) who would like to use them for printouts from VMS. Has anyone ever seen and software to turn an XP box into a printserver? I'm looking for something to listen on port 9100 and pass print jobs to the local printer. I know I can use LPR, but if I can find somthing that uses the existing setup it's all the better.

Re: Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

RBrown_1 — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 22:44:33 GMT

I think I did this once: LPR it is.

I installed the LPD server on the XP box and created a queue for an LPR printer on my VMS system.

The results were not really satisfactory because the things I wanted to print from VMS were mostly plain text, and windows printers are mostly too stupid to know what to do with ASCII. Seems to me that I tried printing some TeX (dvijep) files and that did not work real well either.

If I get some time, I'll try again and see if current results are different from old memories.

Re: Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

Peter Weaver_1 — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 01:41:50 GMT

You might want to take a look at http://www.printfil.com/eexam.htm#4. A customer had a similar request one time and based on the description I figured this might work. But I never got around to testing it because the requirements changed.

Re: Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

Hoff — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 03:15:03 GMT

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324078

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/150930

http://www.frogmorecs.com/arts/configure-lpdsvc

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/83final/6526/6526pro_053.html#lpd_chap

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/18972-18972-236253-34214-64302-28830.html

http://h20338.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/downloads/HPJetdirectProductGuideTrifold_May09_rev7.pdf

Re: Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

Hoff — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 03:18:34 GMT

Forgot one... Save your sanity...

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/help/upgrading-from-windows-xp-to-windows-7

Re: Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

Lester Dreckow — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 05:40:36 GMT

Phil,

We found that Winlpd (sharware product) was less troublesome than XP's Print Services for Unix. It can listen on port 9100 and on the VMS end we could just use a telnetsym queue /ON="ipaddress:9100".

(That was a few years ago.)

Regards,
Lester

Re: Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

Phil Lawson — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:13:10 GMT

I did try using lpr and had some trouble getting it to work. If I am printing to a network printer that is configured on the PC the print job goes thru (indicating to me that it's set up correct on the pc, but if I try to change that same setup to a driectly connected printer then the print jobs disappear, and nothing prints. any idea what I need to do with windows print services for unix to get it to work with a directly attached printer?

Re: Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

Phil Lawson — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 00:15:22 GMT

Lester, thanks. do you have a link for that driver? I looked but just found rabox.com, but thats a pay for it driver, and does not seem to be accepting new payments now. (also a bit pricy) Thanks.

Re: Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

Lester Dreckow — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 07:46:42 GMT

Hi Phil,

Yes, it was V1.2 from http://rabox.com/winlpd/.

We used it in 2005, before Vista and Windows 2007. I see, the Buy Now link goes nowhere. Sorry about that.

Lester