Printing

[Bryan Young]

We are currently running HPUX 11 on a very large V2600 server with almost 700 concurrent users. We do all our printing via lp - but this is Very resource intensive since all the interface scripts execute locally. I would like to move the print function off to another UNIX server. Is there an HP tool that will help us do this? I remember hearing about an Openspool product but I'm not sure if it's still around.

Thanks.

[Rodney Hills]

How many printers do you have? Usually the print drivers just copy data to the printer.

If you want to move all printing to a central system, then you can use "sam" to configure.

HPUX has a replacement printing system called "Distributed Print Services". Rather than "lp" is used the command "pdpr".

-- Rod Hills

[steven Burgess_2]

Hi

Openspool is an extremely old product which HP are soon due to stop supporting

Steve

[Sandip Ghosh]

You do not need any tools. Configure the printers on the other UNIX Server and on the V-class configure the printers as a remote printer on the other unix box.

There is a tool 'transferqueue' to transfer the queues to the other Server. You can get detail if you do 'man transferqueue'

Sandip

[Bryan Young]

We have several hundred printers, and several thousand print jobs printed a day. I took a look at one of the interface scripts (from /usr/spool/lp/interface/) and it was six pages of various OS commands. Watching glance, I notice hundreds of jobs spawned per second which must be print related (rm for example is a very popular command). I will check out pdpr, I assume that will force those large scripts to be executed on a seperate CPU.

[Rita C Workman]

Openspool is 'around' ....although it's not a product that is available or truly supported anymore.
You could do remote printing using the above suggested HP Distributed Printing...or (since I have Openspool and am looking to upgrade to something else) I have been reading about Unispool http://www.hollandhouse.com/unispool/news/pr_migrateos.html
..just as another option.

Rgrds,
Rita

[Mark Greene_1]

OpenSpool is on cd #4 of the additional software cd set you get with your system. It may even already be installed, you can check in SAM.

You can use this product to setup print queues to another Unix system. You can also do this just using lp on both systems as well: the first system has queues setup as remote, pointing to queues on the second system which are local.

HTH
mark

[Rich Wright]

I went through this process a few years ago. I looked at unispool, LPPlus+, and VistaPlus. It depends on your print needs. In my case, we had tons & tons of reports. We went to online storeage and viewing of reports using VistaPlus and everyone loved it. They got access to the reports faster. The reports were available online within seconds instead of waiting for printing and/or delivery. Users could format and extract information directly to Spread Sheet software instead of having to re-type the info into their spreadsheets.

We calculated that we saved $100,000 yearly in printing costs alone.

[Bill Hassell]

Openspool and DPS are much more processor intensive than lp, so these would not be good choices. Although the interface scripts have hundreds of lines of code, only a few lines are actually executed during the print job itself. The rest of the code is used for processing options and most likely, your users aren't using very many options at all.

Now if the majority of print jobs are VERY small, say 1 or 2 pages, then perhaps the startup code in the scripts will be somewhat significant. In that case, you may want to look at what the majority of users are printing. If users are not printing plain ASCII files, then the majority of the options are ignored, even if supplied, and that means that you could simplify the printer script to just the 'dumb' script, about as simple as it gets.

But if the task of modifying all the printer scripts and testing the new configuration is too large, then indeed, using another HP-UX server to perform the task makes a lot of sense. A small A-class machine will do nicely.

Do not make the mistake of using a PC or other non-HP-UX system...all of the -o options for lp will be ignored and ASCII files will print stairstepped down the page.