HCON 1.3.1 UNATTENDED PRINTING SUPPORT
ITEM: RTA000093210
Please, we need more details than those given by LLET LP92-0657,
concerning unattended printing emulation in HCON version 1.3.1.
Specifically, we need to know about the following:
1) Can a daemon be started to receive every print job from the
host? Can the printing session behave as a daemon?
2) Is there any way to receive and store the print jobs in the
RS/6000 in files automatically named by the daemon (or the printing
session), given a file naming convention (e.g. A prefix)?
3) Will the unattended printing session run absolutely detached from
the tty from which it was invoked?
If any of the previous questions has a negative answer, please explain
clearly the reason, and if there is any trick or workaround to give
that functionality.
ANSWER
In answer to your questions on printing emulation in HCON 1.3.1:
1) This version now has the capability to start a printer session in the
background. This printer session can be started through smit or from
the command line. If starting it through smit, you have the capability
of also specifying that you want this printer session started at
reboot also. The printer session is associated with an AIX print queue
or direct device. In this way, even though the printer session is not
really a daemon, it is behaving much like one.
2) If you wanted the print jobs stored in files instead of immediately
printed, this is something you could implement at the AIX queueing
system level. By changing the "file = " parameter in your /etc/qconfig
stanza for that printer, you could make jobs just be appended to the
filename that you specify. Alternately, you could substitute your own
shell script as the backend, which could create new filenames however
you wanted for each print job to go into.
3) If you specified in starting the printer session through smit that you
wanted the session to start at reboot time, this would accomplish the
detachment. Alternately if you were starting the session (i.e. session
"a") from the command line, you should be able to enter the following:
"nohup e789pr a &"
====> USER: 66147610 AT TOROHON1 F Martinez ============= DATE:930512 TIME:1007
Thanks a lot for your answer, which has been very useful. We tried
with HCON v1.3.1 (V1.3.0 + some PTF's) and with the e789pr command.
We were successful in generating the process in background, starting it
trough smit. But the only thing that did not work was that the process
e789pr b is not alive at REBOOT time. (Of course, we understand that it
cannot work unless SNA Services is active). Are we missing any step
or are we misunderstanding the meaning of "start at REBOOT time"
of smit menu?
ANSWER
I do not have the product here to test, but from the documentation and
other research, when you select to start printer session after reboot,
the default behaviour is that it puts the startup command in the crontab
file to start at 6:30 in the morning after a reboot.
You are free to modify and customize this as you see fit.
S e a r c h - k e y w o r d s:
HCON PRINT BACKGROUND 1.3.1 SESSION E789PR
WWQA: ITEM: RTA000093210 ITEM: RTA000093210
Dated: 03/1996 Category: ITSAI6000HW
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