Wow,

this thread has produced more than what could be answered with a single
posting, and much of it will only be answered at a later point in time,
I just picked the last post (on our newsserver) as the anchor for a very
preliminary form of response here.

> but the fact remains that HP NEEDS to provide a supported (and fully functional)
> printing solution (even/especially an ALL-HP solution) for HP3000s. Doing so
> doesn't step on the third parties; though IMHO that's irrelevant... You just
> can't sell a server that can't print (reliably) to ANYTHING - or all that
> output just has to go to the bit-bucket... like our complaints about the
> "broken" mpe printing capability seem to be.

Sorry, while I wholeheartedly agree with the fundamentals of this statement,
I do not like the notion that we are disresponsive.

As a matter of (sofar unpublished) fact we have formed a little task force
consisting of two WTEC engineers, and several CSY folks, to investigate
the 'state of affairs' for MPE network spooling.

We are far too early in the process to address 3000-L in a 'state of the union'
type of way, but let me throw out a few early (raw format) thoughts here:

we think that

- there is a level of misinformation about the networking spooler's operation
  'out there', from both customer sources like this group and HP engineers
  in the field and RCs.
  we think the proper answer to that is better (external) information
and
  (ex/internal) education, probably in the form of something like white papers,
  application notes, troobleshooting guides or cookbooks.

- there are probably a few shortcomings of the current coding or overall
  design of the MPE networking spooler (PJL issues, page level recovery
  not working on some printers, SNMP issues?, TCP issues? serial spooler
  compatibility, ...).
  we think the proper answer to that is to investigate them piece by
  piece, analyse the root causes, fix what we can fix, and document it _IF_
  we cannot.

- there are probably issues which are no fault of the MPE networking
spooler,
  but possiblly issues with the PJL, page_level_recovery, SNMP and maybe even
  TCP support in the firmware of certain HP printers, Jetdirect cards, or
  JetDirect boxes.
  should we find those, it may not be in our realm to fix them (though we
  will surely address them), but we can and will surely document them.


We would like to thank you in advance for your help, cooperation and
patience in order to address these issues and improve the quality of
our product.


Goetz Neumann,
Worldwide Technology Expert Center (WTEC) for MPE/iX OS.
Hewlett-Packard Germany.