ITEM: BP9696L

Remote printing from AIX to Apple LaserWriter

ENV:
AIX 4.1.4
Unknown model
Apple LaserWriter network printer

DESC: customer is trying to print to an Apple Laserwriter printer on
his network.  He has setup the printer with an ip address and can
ping the printer.

ACT: I had him try "telnet \ 515" and got back "connected".
I then stepped him through adding a remote print queue with local
filtering.  He setup as a Generic-ASCII queue.  We used rq=text.
Setup the bsdshort and bsdlong form filters and when doing an lpstat
he was able to get a "no entries" response back from the laserwriter.

ACT:
A remote queue was created to print to the LaserWriter's lpd daemon
to a remote queue named "text" and when jobs are queued they go
through the queue, nothing prints.

We installed bos.net.tcp.server to get the iptrace utility and ran
an iptrace and see the job is successfully being sent across the
network to the printer, but nothing actually prints...

We tried plain ASCII data, we tried PCL, and PostScript.  All jobs
successfully get to the printer at a TCP/IP level, but nothing prints.

Conferencing in with Apple LaserWriter support to see if together we
can diagnose and get this going...

iptrace -a -b -p printer -s \ -d \ /tmp/trace
Sent a print job
ps -ef |grep iptrace
kill the iptrace process
ipreport /tmp/trace > /tmp/report

It turns out that the printer was set to accept PostScript only
from TCP/IP connections, but autosense for other network protocols.
However, setting TCP/IP to autosense changed the results, but they
weren't much better... Now the lpd on the LaserWriter is sending
back ACK that it got the data, but the packets with the ACK have
no data.  According to RFC1179, these packets are supposed to have
a 0x00   (OK response) to acknowledge... So, AIX doesn't reply, 
waiting for a 0x00 data byte to come in... The printer just sends
an empty ACK packet once every second... The print job just stays
is a RUNNING state.  At this point in time, netstat -a shows:

netstat -a|grep printer
tcp        0      0  foodserver.tamu..1020  LWone.tamu.edu.printer FIN_WAIT_2
tcp        0      0  foodserver.tamu..1021  LWone.tamu.edu.printer FIN_WAIT_2

We conferenced in Apple Network Support who said that this problem
occurs when the printer is set to auto-sense between PCL and PostScript.
We set it up for PCL only, and our jobs printed properly.

Suggested that if he needed to print PostScript and PCL, he could
setup just a PostScript queue and then enscript the non-
PostScript jobs.




Support Line: Remote printing from AIX to Apple LaserWriter ITEM: BP9696L

Dated: October 1996 Category: N/A

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