Printing from VMS to a pc slave printer

[Phil Lawson]

I've got a few users who have directly attached printers (USB) who would like to use them for printouts from VMS. Has anyone ever seen and software to turn an XP box into a printserver? I'm looking for something to listen on port 9100 and pass print jobs to the local printer. I know I can use LPR, but if I can find somthing that uses the existing setup it's all the better.

[RBrown_1 · Accepted solution]

I think I did this once: LPR it is.

I installed the LPD server on the XP box and created a queue for an LPR printer on my VMS system.

The results were not really satisfactory because the things I wanted to print from VMS were mostly plain text, and windows printers are mostly too stupid to know what to do with ASCII. Seems to me that I tried printing some TeX (dvijep) files and that did not work real well either.

If I get some time, I'll try again and see if current results are different from old memories.

[Peter Weaver_1]

You might want to take a look at http://www.printfil.com/eexam.htm#4. A customer had a similar request one time and based on the description I figured this might work. But I never got around to testing it because the requirements changed.

[Hoff]

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324078

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/150930

http://www.frogmorecs.com/arts/configure-lpdsvc

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/doc/83final/6526/6526pro_053.html#lpd_chap

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF05a/18972-18972-236253-34214-64302-28830.html

http://h20338.www2.hp.com/Hpsub/downloads/HPJetdirectProductGuideTrifold_May09_rev7.pdf

[Hoff]

Forgot one... Save your sanity...

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/help/upgrading-from-windows-xp-to-windows-7

[Lester Dreckow]

Phil,

We found that Winlpd (sharware product) was less troublesome than XP's Print Services for Unix. It can listen on port 9100 and on the VMS end we could just use a telnetsym queue /ON="ipaddress:9100".

(That was a few years ago.)

Regards,
Lester

[Phil Lawson]

I did try using lpr and had some trouble getting it to work. If I am printing to a network printer that is configured on the PC the print job goes thru (indicating to me that it's set up correct on the pc, but if I try to change that same setup to a driectly connected printer then the print jobs disappear, and nothing prints. any idea what I need to do with windows print services for unix to get it to work with a directly attached printer?

[Phil Lawson]

Lester, thanks. do you have a link for that driver? I looked but just found rabox.com, but thats a pay for it driver, and does not seem to be accepting new payments now. (also a bit pricy) Thanks.

[Lester Dreckow]

Hi Phil,

Yes, it was V1.2 from http://rabox.com/winlpd/.

We used it in 2005, before Vista and Windows 2007. I see, the Buy Now link goes nowhere. Sorry about that.

Lester