Printer management suggestions please

[Francis Noël]

Greetings all, I need your opinion on printer management under HP-UX ( 10 and 11i ). We are talking about around 500 printers, shared with Windows machines that have their own print servers.

There was a time when all printers here were HP Laserjets of different flavors.

Mopiers are popping up everywhere now, replacing LJs, and they are made by Ricoh and Xerox.

Currently all Lasertjet print queues are handled with the hppi interface, which works good. Xerox and Ricoh Mopiers are queued as remote printers, since they are "standalone print servers".

Problem is that with remote printers there are no model scripts and hence no command line options to pass. Ricoh is kind enough to supply modelscripts and a config utility through their website but the options are not compatible with those used by hppi. This means that apps, scripts and batch jobs would need to know what type if printer it is calling to format its command accordingly....not acceptable. And as for the Xeroxes.....

What I need is a unified print management platform for HP-UX that can handle HP, Xerox, Ricoh and heck why not Epson printers while presenting a uniform interface to the users/apps. CUPS comes to mind.

I'm curious : no doubt this situation is not uncommon, how did YOU deal with it ? .

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Cups or Samba is an excellent choice. It will work nicely and play well with Windows print queues.

I used a product called easyspooler from http://www.easyspooler.com

The company was purchased and the support staff was gutted in 2004.

Still, its affordable and works with standard escape codes.

HP had a product called Dazzle. It cost more than two rp5450 servers, but might make sense if you can afford 500 printers.

easyspooler worked well with copier/printer combos, as I recall.

My HP-9000 servers work with the windows print queuue, using standard lp commands far as I know. I am quite happy where I work now, not having to do a single printer related help desk call or configuraiton.

Did I say happy? I meant ecstatic.

SEP

[A. Clay Stephenson]

CUPS is one approach and adding MIME based filters is nice but it won't solve all your problems. Printing under HP-UX is complicated by the difference between "Remote" and "Network" (ie JetDirect) printers --- with Network being the preferred option. The least evil approach I have found is to make all printers network printers by the expedient of using external JetDirect's for those printers which do not have native JetDirect support. Many non-HP printers emulate the JetDirecr protocol. In a few cases, uses can choose to connect to the printer's native IP address or to it's external JetDirect IP address that is in turn connected to the printer's parallel or serial port.

[Francis Noël]

Thank you for your input, it is much appreciated.
I have no experience with CUPS or any system outside of hppi.

Someone has suggested setting up a Linux CUPS server, outfitting the HP9000s with CUPS clients and having the Linux print through the Windows print services that are already in place ( serving print requests for 3000+ desktops ).

Sounds like quite a task, does it sound sane to you ?

[Geoff Wild]

For Xerox, I use xpadmin - so you can print directly...

http://www.support.xerox.com/go/results.asp?Xlang=en_US&XCntry=USA&prodID=DC440&ripId=

Unless you want to get into a "high" end printing solution - like the HP/Dazel Output Server...

http://www.hp.com/united-states/outputmanagement/products/output_server.html

Rgds...Geoff

[Bill Hassell]

HPPI is designed for HP JetDirect interfaces and except for the portable external (parallel) interfaces, most non-HP manufacturers do not provide a port 9100 protocol equivalent, so HPPI doesn't see the non-HP LAN cards. But the problem you have is not with the interface but the lp interface. The SysV spooler has not been significantly changed in the last couple of decades and is very poor in handling "remote" printer on other computers. It was assumed (in the design of the SysV spooler) that remote printers would only be on the same OS (ie, HP-UX), but for BSD compastibility, the -o options would be ignored since they must be processed prior to sending to the remote server.

What is needed therefore is a central spooler pathway that uses model scripts. As long as the HPPI software can see the printer, you can use a basic script and add options as needed. Naturally, the different languages used by the different manuafacturers (ie, PCL, Epson codes, Postscript, etc) do not help at all. Getting all these printers to work the same way is a significant challenge.

If all your applications *always* use the lp command for each print job, you could create a wrapper to pre-process each job.

[Francis Noël]

Thanks again for your input.

No easy way out I guess.