6. The printers the respooler will print to can be used deviceless. However, if they aren't
the respooler should connect to them automatically as long as the username at the
respooler machine has permission to access them.
7. At the end of startup.cmd start the respooler:
net start respooler
8. The respooler responds to the normal Lan Manager service commands, so it can be
started, stopped, paused, and continued.
The respooler has been tested with an HP 3000 connected to multiple ports on a PS/2
model 80 running OS/2 1.3 SE and Lan Manager 2.0B with no problems so far. In setting the port configurations it is necessary to determine the proper flow control etc. to use. Using
the mode command to set these parameters provides the greatest flexibility. Hardware
requirements for the respooler will depend on the amount of utilization. In our case a 16MHZ
386 machine which was also used to run our test/development SQL server was sufficient.
What must be considered is how often multiple host printers are simultaneously active. In
our case 3 were no problem. A much larger number could be active with some kind of
bus-master serial controller. If hardware flow control is used with a PS/2, speed buffering
can be enabled through mode with buffer=auto.
The end cap for print jobs is determined by the timeout parameter. After no characters are
read from the serial port for the specified number of seconds the print job is end capped.
In the event that several very large print jobs are spooled back to back without sufficient
pauses to allow end capping, extremely large spool files will result, so ensure that the
spool volume on your server has plenty of space. It is possible that a printer could be
utilized non-stop in which case the current respooler implementation would never end cap,
the jobs would never print, and your server would run out of disk space. Although this is
unlikely to happen in most environments, the next release will have a feature to auto end
cap and split up large jobs after so many pages. If your host system sends an EOJ character or anything uniquely discernable between print jobs then the respooler could be modified to
look for this and thus avoid the end cap problems all together.
Another possibility I have considered is routing host print jobs to various printers identified
by a control sequence at the beginning of each print job. This would allow one serial port
to connect to the host and multiplex all of the print jobs. On the host side it would require
flexibility in how JSeps are set up. Our HP doesn't allow this, at least not easily, so I have
opted for the multiple port approach.
If you have any questions call:
Phillip Austin
(405) 841-9366 or (405) 751-6748
P.S. I do custom programming and consulting if any one is interested.