Robert,

The "e-spool" everyone is telling you about is ESPUL from RAC Consulting. It's a great product IMHO. We've used it  both to send print to and receive print from UNIX hosts (HP9000) and works like a champ! It uses LPD/LPR. As I remember, it's pretty inexpensive, too. 

--Ken Kirby
  Vanderbilt University

-----Original Message-----
From:   Robert Woodcock [SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
Sent:   Sunday, September 21, 1997 12:13 AM
Subject:        SNMP queries for printing?

I've been put on a project involving replacing some HP DTC's with Linux
boxen, which will recieve print requests via TCP/IP from our MPE hosts.
(The idea being we'll be able to remotely administrate these things.)
There will be 8 serial printers hooked up to each Linux box, and this end
of things is working great. The problem is the MPE will only transfer
print jobs using HP's Jetdirect protocol. I figured the protocol was
rather simple, just accept anything coming your way on TCP port 9100,
so I coded up a simple daemon to do this, making sure I could multihome
it for all 8 serial ports, and therefore all 8 IP's.

Now when we try and get the MPE host to print to it, all we get on the
Linux end (according to our trusty packet dumper, tcpdump) are SNMP
queries. I've been told that these queries are to check to make sure the
printer is on, has paper, and is otherwise ready to print. Well, that's
nice and all, but I don't know how to go about responding to these
queries, and tcpdump isn't quite showing me what the MPE host is looking
for.

Does anyone know exactly what the MPE box is looking for? I must admit I'm
rather new to MPE... :)

Also my coworkers (who have all already said I'm SOL, not to mention crazy)
have been telling me e-spool could be a way out of this. Not having heard
of e-spool before, I'm curious - does it do LPR/LPD nicely? Opinions?

SNMP is *the last* stumbling block on getting this to work - other more
assuming spooling software such as various win95 shareware print to the
linux box via the jetdirect protocol just fine, to my amazement. :)

Pointers to docs are more than welcome.
--
Robert Woodcock - [log in to unmask]
"No.  A trade secret is a lot like virginity.  Once it's lost its lost."
        -- Michael H. Warfield, on the I2O specification.