Printer Pooling under VMS

[Kyle Snavely_1]

Has anyone ever used printer pooling under VMS? (Same concept as the MS Windows printer pooling) I've found little information on this topic. The basic information I've found leads me to believe that a generic queue should be created that redirects to execution queues?

Could anyone point me in the right direction or shed a bit of light on the subject?

Thanks

[Åge Rønning · Accepted solution]

I don't know MS Windows printer pooling, But if you want to know more about how to manager OpenVMS queues have a look at http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/731FINAL/DOCUMENTATION/PDF/OVMS_731_SYS_MAN1.PDF

14-3 & 14-4 could be a good start in that manual.

[Lokesh_2]

Hi ,

Yes, the concept of printer pooling is there in VMS . The term used here is generic queue.

Suppose you have two queues ( execution ) defined on you VMS box named A & B . Then you can create a generic queue name C as follows:

$initialize/que/start/generic=(a,b) C

Then , if you submit you print request to queue C , then it will pick any printer A or B whichever is free.

One more thing, if you do not specify any queue names with generic qualifier, then the queue C will submit its job to any available execution queue on the system ( provided the particular queue is not set as NOENABLE_GENERIC ) .

For more information, you can refer OpenVMS system administartion manuals.

Best regards,
Lokesh

[Sheldon Smith]

Be advised, as long as you have a steady job stream, the jobs will share between the two (or however many) execution queues. When both (all) printers are idle, a new job goes to the first (available) printer.
I've known sites to set up periodic (daily or even weekly) batch jobs to rotate the printers in the /generic switch, so that over a long period of time one printer does not get used excessively compared to the rest.

[Mike Naime]

I did this a lot back in the mid 90's. Back before we started using an on-screen review process to save boxes of printer paper.

The command that Lokesh describes is the correct way to setup a generic printer pool.

The problem that I had with that job was that we generated output reports from our simulator faster than they would print on the LA210 printers. If I remember right, an LA210 would pring about 10 blocks per minute. Making a 600 block file about an hours worth of printing. Initially I had to manually balance the print jobs between 4 differnet print queues. If one queue was overloaded, I had to shift printing jobs to a different queue. Then one night I figured out the GENERIC print que.

We first implemented this with 4 different printers, we used the generic=(a,b,c,d). The A printer was the "Prefered" printer if nothing was being printed at the time.

Later, we where asked to re-design this so that certain reports would go to a primary printer if it was not busy, with an "overflow" printer also in the generic list. This way the person monitoring the printer would know that he was getting specific reports, with overflow reports going to the overflow printer.

Ex: (a,d) (b,d) (c,d)

you need to analyse your printing requirements, and make sure that your logic is correct for what you want to accomplish. The easiest way is not necessarily the best way to get your desired end results.

Note: we kept those LA-210 printers going for 24 hours strait for 5-7 days. They only stopped printing to change the ribbon, or feed in a new box of paper! :-)

[Robert Atkinson]

Kyle,
if you mean printer spooling in terms of "Print while spool", i.e. print this file while it is still being written, then I'm afraid that it doesn't really exist in a managed way.

You need to issue a print command to a complete and unaccessed file, otherwise you'll get a file locked type error.

However.....there is a way to cheat. You could set up a permanent reverse TELNET port to the printer, then get your program to open this port and dump data (the printout) to it, as it is created.

Using this method, you can't have 2 applications/users accessing the port at the same time though.

If I'm on the right track, give me a shout and I'll give you the commands for setting this up.

Rob.