Marco Santerre
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Canadian National Railways

   Maybe one of you can help with this one.  I know we have talked in
length about network printing but I just finally upgraded my systems to
5.5 PP4.  I wanted to start installing Network printing on my machines..
unfortunately, when I follow instructions it doesn't work.  The reason
is I don't use JetDirect cards as most of our network printers are on
Banyan LAN also.  So, instead of using JetDirect cards, my company
elected to go with ExtendNet boxes.  These boxes are SNMP compliant.
When I talked to HP RC, naturally, I was told that if I don't have a
JetDirect card, they can't help me.  I hope that one of you have a
similar environment where you are not using a JetDirect box and could
help me in pointing out where to go next, or what to do next.
<snip>

Yes there is something that you can do. It seems like HP is trying to force
everyone to buy JetDirect boxes so they made it so that network printing
from the 3000 only work with JetDirect boxes. However, they did include a
undocumented feature that will allow network printing to work with other
print server boxes. You must add a line to each devices config block in the
NPCONFIG.PUB.SYS file. The only problem with this solution is that this
option turn off all handshaking with the printer. If you use this option the
3000 will send the printer a raw stream of data until the spoolfile is
printed. This means that you could loose a part of or all of a spool file if
the printer accepts the data and does not print anything. Also it will not
support page level recovery so if you stop printing a spoolfile in the
middle it will reprint the entire spoolfile when you restart the spooler.
Here is the big secret:

snmp_enabled=FALSE

Example of a device config block for a Intel NETXPORT server box:

3003 (network_address=???.???.???.???
      TCP_port_number=3001
      snmp_enabled=FALSE)


Hope this helps.


Sincerely,
Joshua Johnson
Systems Manager
MicroWarehouse