distributed printing

[Adam Juntunen]

Hi,
I'm a pretty green sys admin for an engineering company and this is my first post.

We've got 70 visualize workstations scattered accross several states in 6 separate locations & there are only 2 of us that support the OS and hardware - that includes printing/plotting. Right now, we set up printing separately on each machine which takes some time.

We're thinking of using the HPDPS package for hpux 11.0 and I've got a few questions before I propose it to the boss.

Has anyone used it before and does it provide some benefit.

What if you don't use DCE, is it still worth it?

Our veteran sys admin said there were some problems with DCE and the Oracle portion of Interlink (a pro engineer product) back in hpux 10.2. Does anyone know if that's fixed.

Finally, does anyone know if HPDPS comes with 11.0 or do we have to buy it and how much does it cost?

thanks,

adam

[Ralph Grothe]

Hi Adam,

not that I want to distract you from HPDPS (of which I admittedly know nothing) but have a visit to this site:

http://www.cups.org

CUPS (the Common Unix Printing System) sounds very promising, and hopefully will become the de-facto standard on Unix, killing the old beasts lpr/lprng.
At least almost all printer manufacturers are willing to support the IPP.

[Edward Alfert_2 · Accepted solution]

It seems others don't think to highly of HPDPS:
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x7dd1d06ed8c8d4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

Also, HP may even be phasing it out...It isn't supported on 11i, only 10.20 and 11.00 ... take a look at this:
http://us-support2.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=95f22b8c0a3149d9e5/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000055935203

[Rita C Workman]

Would the old faithful JetAdmin work for you...??

Rita

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Adam:

I've run Pro/E plots in a networked environment
and had to plot from HP-UX, Windows, Solaris, IRIX, and Tru64 UNIX all in the same network. The JetAdmin software handled it just fine.

[Adam Juntunen]

Thanks everyone. We've been using jetadmin so far - and I think we'll continue to keep things the way they are.

It's currently set up so each user can see the plotters in their area. However, some of our users had requested to print to other buildings/areas. So I was toying with the idea of using the HPDPS so that everyone could see every printer. I don't want to do that with just jetadmin. Oh well, the users can't have everything (and where would they put it all).

Adam