Subject: Re: which printers will work?
To: Bob Beck <beck@obtuse.com>
From: Laine Stump <laine@morningstar.SPAM-FREE-OR-DIE.com>
List: netbsd-users
Date: 07/23/1997 07:01:43
beck@obtuse.com (Bob Beck) writes:


>#include <bob/2cents.h>
>Buy an HP, with postscript and preferebly ethernet on it. 

>	Anne, are you a sysadmin at concordia? I work at the U of A
>where we have gravitated (after many years of painful experiences) To
>JetDirect (ethernet) connected HP Laserjets on a Maze of twisty little
>Unix versions (all different).

Great! Someone who uses JetDirects with lots of different Unices. Maybe you can help me to
understand them better.

We have two HP printers with JetDirect cards. Traditionally, their management has been
handled by some HP-supplied software running on a Sparc running SunOS 4.1.4. We would like
to retire that machine, and let one of our NetBSD machines manage the printers, or just
have them manage themselves. I looked on HP's website and they make it sound like you need
to have some machine that manages the queue for the printer, but the only PC-based OS they
support for this is WinNT; they don't support any PC-based Unix, not even Solaris.

So, what does a person do when they 1) want to keep their printers connected with
ethernet, and 2) want no machines in a server capacity on their network except PCs running
NetBSD (ie, no SunOS, no NT)? Can the printers take care of themselves and handle jobs
frmo both Unix and MS-Windows clients? Or perhaps the Unix machines can use Samba's
smbclient to talk to the printer? (I do that to an HP at home that's plugged into a Win95
box - works wonderfully).

Laine "Ignorant about JetDirect" Stump