Date: Mon, 29 May 2000 01:58:01 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: some lpr changes: background Message-ID: <v04210110b5577616fa55@[128.113.24.47]>
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Hi. I'm a systems programmer at RPI (Troy NY), and back in the early 90's we migrated most of campus computing from a mainframe to unix workstations. We started off with both Sun and IBM workstations, and needed a printing system that would work the same on both platforms. Someone found a bsd-ish lpr "on the net" and we got that running on AIX and probably SunOS (pre-Solaris). In the mid-nineties I took that over, adding support for newer versions of AIX, Solaris, and later IRIX. We also added a bunch of other customizations, as various needs arose. I did some net searching of my own, and of the lpr's I could find at the time, ours seemed to be the closest to FreeBSD's. I meant to merge the two, but other events pretty much tied up my schedule. I am now getting back to doing that, and I see people have made a LOT of improvements in the meantime! I've now caught up with enough of those changes that I should be able to start to writing updates for freebsd's current source to add features we've had here. Our environment is that we have a few hundred workstations which share the exact same userid space (via AFS). We have some more workstations which do not have the same userid's, but do want to print. We have well over 200 print queues, but I think only about 150 of them are used enough to notice. We have one samba-based server accepting jobs from PC users. We have four or five main print servers (and the samba server is not one of them...). Most of the print servers accept jobs from Mac users via CAP (eew), and most of the print queues are driven via CAP/ethertalk (at least at the moment). The vast majority of our printers are networked Postscript printers (obviously, given the CAP angle...). Printers range from simple B&W lasers, to expensive color printers, to big color plotters (HP DesignJet and Phaser 600). One very important criteria for us is that we have to be able to charge users on a per-job basis for what they've printed. It's amazing how many people "need" listings of all X manuals if they can print for free, and how no one needs them all if we charge 5 cents a page... So, I'd like to contribute at least some of these RPI-ish changes back to freebsd (as I sort them out...), just because I think they could be useful for other people. I am aware of lprNG, which is popular among many "heavy-duty printing" sites (in fact, it is used by the CS dept at RPI). The irony is that I may very well switch over to lprNG after getting all these updates sorted out, but I'd still like to sort them out just because I'd hate to see them all thrown away. I'd like to start up a discussion with any FreeBSD'ers who do use the default lpr to handle a lot of printing. I'm not sure this mailing list is the best place for that, but it was suggested so I'll try it here. Note that I'm interested in both updating the FreeBSD lpr, and in having a separate-ish package for lpr that someone could install on other OS's (after all, almost all the machines I'm running this on are NOT freebsd...). I sometimes think of this as the "lpr:ce" project, compared to "lpr:ng". The Sci Fi network had "Star Trek: Classic Edition", where they took the original star trek episodes and spruced them up. That's basically what I want to do. In my own mind, anyone who wants really heavy-duty printing should probably still dive into lprNG. I do not intend to work as hard as Patrick does. Also, there's probably a question of how to best feed these changes into freebsd. If I do a PR for each of them, I'm going to drive some committers crazy. At the same time, it would be prudent for several others to test these, since almost all of my real-world (production) testing is on non-FreeBSD machines. I'll send a separate message with a list of some of the changes we have made... It'll probably be a bit long. --- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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