Max number of printers allowed in vms?

[Rich Hearn]

Hi all,

Is there a max number of printers that vms will allow to be created? We currently have 1938 set up and I'm wondering if/when we'll "hit the wall" that will prevent us from creating anymore printers.

Tnx,
Rich

[Volker Halle]

Rich,

how are your printers connected ?

LAT printers: LTAnnnn device names would be limited to 9999 and no room for interactive LAT use.

TELNETSYM and LPD - no. of queues in OpenVMS, is there a limit ?

Parallel or serial printer connections would be limited by the HW config, not by OpenVMS.

Volker.

[Wim Van den Wyngaert]

For TCP (and not only queues) there are some limits on the number of connections. Check sysconfig -q socket and check with google for more info searching with the option name.

Note that you might be using 10 print connections at 1 moment but also 1938 (e.g. after network problems). Some queues may fail to open a connection (but should normally retry later on). Worse is that they could take the sockets needed by your applications.

Wim

[Rich Hearn]

Volker,

Oops, I should've mentioned that... the printers are lpd queues and we're running a 2 node cluster (ES47's with VMS 7.3-2 (pat kit v0700), Multinet v5.1) not the std TCP/IP services for VMS. That being said, we have ~105 print symbionts running on the system, going out on NTY devices to NETques/JetDirects.

Thanks for the interest & questions,
Rich

[labadie_1]

Check your max number of sockets with
$ ana/sys
tcpip sh inetcb/stat
look at
act/max_socket

it may be near 32767 if you have a lot of Tcpip activity.

Do you have a problem (performance, failure...) or was your question theoretical ?

[Volker Halle]

Rich,

NTY devices seem to be associated with NTYSMB queues, not with LPD queues. And I would assume those NTYSMB print symbionts to each handle 32 queues = 32 NTY devices per symbiont.

Idle LPD queues (at least with HP TCPIP) do not consume any TCPIP devices). There seems to be one LPD symbiont process for each queue. They will need TCPIP sockets, when there is a file to be printed.

Volker.

[Cass Witkowski · Accepted solution]

If the print queues are set up with remote-printer-queues.com then you will find that you may run into a limitation with DCL. Each printer entry had multiple DCL labels in this command procedure. I can't remember the exact number of printers we had before it choked.

Cass

[Rich Hearn]

Wim,
Thank you for the thoughts on the connections & your ideas about
them. I'll have a look into that scenario

labadie,
Thank you for the info on ana/sys and the thought of the 32767 max
sockets. I'll see if that applies to Multinet too.

To answer *your* question as to why, we have a printer naming
scheme PQxx (based on our IBM-MVS system running home-grown
code) that has a 4 char limitation. We're about to "run out" on the
IBM, so we're expanding it to PQxxx for Windows & VMS, and I'm
attempting to make sure that we won't run into any problems with
VMS because we've exceeded something I was un-aware of.

Volker,
I made a rather large mistake. The devices are NLP *not* NTY - I have
no idea why I wrote that. We have 16 printers to a symbiont. A show
dev/full shows device type of LP11. I notice that earlier, there were
100+ symbionts running, now there's about 25. I wonder if they work as
you were describing - only need TCP sockets when printing. I'll have to
check with Process Software. Thanks again for *your* interest.

Cass,
Thank you for your experience with this. Yes we use remote-printer-queues.com
it'll be interesting to see what Process has to say about this aspect. Even
though you don't remember the exact # of printers, would you remember what
thousands range it was in? (ie: 2xxx? 4xxx? 5xxx?)

Thanks to you all,
Rich

[Cass Witkowski]

it was between 2000 and 3000

[Jim_McKinney]

Regarding Cass' comments, fwiw, the labels in a DCL command procedure are stored in an area whose size is governed by the SYSGEN parameter CLISYMTBL - if you experience SYMOVF failures you can increase this value (with a reboot, it's not dynamic).

Remember, that this area will contain all symbols and labels - not just those created by REMOTE-PRINTER-QUEUE.COM (and the real estate consumed by these others can't be known to Process Software).

You might find $ HELP/MESS SYMOVF interesting.

[Volker Halle]

Jim,

the CLISYMTBL parameter is actually dynamic. It's value is being used during process creation, so you need to logout/login again (or re-create your processes) to use the new value written with SYSGEN> WRITE ACTIVE.

Volker.

[Cass Witkowski]

I looked back at my notes and it was about 2200 printers.

[Jim_McKinney]

Volker wrote

>CLISYMTBL parameter is actually dynamic

yes, my bad. I should have checked prior to writing my previous response. And, one further point of interest, the maximum value for CLISYMTBL is 1024 pages (at least as of v7.3-2).

[Rich Hearn]

Cass,
Thank you for the estimate - it'll prove usefull to know I can expect it soon :^)

Jim,
Appreciate the info on CLISYMTBL - we're already at 1024, so no room to increase it. I will look up Help/Mess SYMOVF - it'd be good to be aware of it.

Volker,
That dynamic ability is a good one to be aware of - thank you.

Rich