NFS vs. PC Interface w/ SCO ODT...

[wolf paul]

In article <568 at bohra.cpg.oz> als at bohra.cpg.oz (Anthony Shipman) writes:
)An, if not the, advantage of PC-I is the remote printing. It will redirect from
)LPT: to a spooler on the UNIX server. This is very useful for programs that
)don't have the option to print into a file. It requires some fiddling
)with timeouts to get right though. 
)
)Apparently DOS has no way of marking the end of a print job. PC-I has to 
)accumulate LPT: output until the application stops sending it for some period 
)and then submit the print job. If the timeout goes off in the middle of the 
)print job it fails.
)
)With NFS you would/should probably have a PC/TCP-like product to do remote
)printing with an "lpr" command. The output from a word processor would have to
)be written to a file first.

No doubt there COULD be PC-NFS products out there which do not provide
printer redirection, but SUN's PC-NFS product works just like the
PC-I features you describe above. Up to three remote printers (i.e.
printers known to the UNIX lp spooler) can be mounted on the PC,
as LPT1 thru LPT3. PC-NFS will let you work with a 5 minute timeout,
or else you can configure and use a hotkey to tell the UNIX spooler
when printing is finished. Also, any DOS "exit" call will send the
job off, thus with a program like WP5.1, which intercepts any hotkey,
one can shell out to DOS and exit again, thus sending the job off.
Using a WP macro, one can even check first that printing is indeed 
finished (WP print queue empty) before executing the "exit".

Wolf
-- 
Wolf N. Paul, Int. Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
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