Howdy,

A couple of weeks ago I asked about getting and HP 3000 and an HP 9000 on
the same to share HP 256x
printers.  We had several replies, most of which didn't have much in the way
of suggestions, but were
contemplating the same scenario.  Somewhere in a cleaning frenzy I managed
to click away those mail
addresses.  As we have, more or less, finally completed the project I'll
post it here.

HP 3000

Hardware:
  Jetdirect cards.

  Serial to paralell interface cards.  For some odd reason when discussing
this piece with people the question
   usually came up "Serial to paralell or paralell to serial?".  Depends on
whether you look at it from the
   network end or the printer end, all of them we looked at were switchable
so it's moot for us.  Got 'em
   from Anixter for $75 each, made in Taiwan but no manufacturer!  On the
box it just says "bidirectional
   interface converter".  Weird.  Works.

Software:

  Netprint from Minisoft.  This setup isn't long for this world so we went
as cheap as possible.  We had
   NP92 laying around from a project back in 1995 so we just reupped the
license to get the current
   2.2 version.  Works OK, but irritates the bejesus out of me that you
cannot alter the configuration
   file dynamically.  You must alter the file, stop then restart the
monitor, this is more of a hassle during
   initital installation and can probably be filed under "Jim's peeved" as
opposed to a real problem.  It also
   has a habit of "orphaning" a spoolfile occasionally, that is, elegible
print files are left just sitting.  Minisoft
   is aware of the problem, but in all fairness I must add that I have not
had much/any time to work with
   them on it.

 Installation/configuration

  You do a lot of monkeying about in NMMGR but it is all pretty well
described in the Netprint manual.  The
   Jetdirect is just the normal JD setup, and the serial parallel box is
just setting dip switches for baud rate, direction,
   parity and such.  Piece o' cake.

HP 9000

Hardware:
  none added

Software:
  Jetadmin software for hpux.  Downloaded from HP.

Installation/configuration

Go into SAM and select printers and plotters, select add network printer.
Jetadmin utility will come up with an option to add network printer since
these printers were already configured via NT there was no reason to
configure them via bootp.  Give it an IP address and configure them as a
printer that supported PCL, then select 0 to process.
Pretty straight forward, the application that we are using already has a
script that allows their reports to be converted and submits them to the
printer and delete the report afterwards.

Conclusion:

At first blush it' a "Now how pray tell are we gonna do that" project.
There are a lot of details and we stumbled about
a bit on the Unix side due to our inexperiance but we made it.  We still
have some shaking out to do (mixing 3000 and
9000 print files to the same printer concurrently may/may not be causing
some initial pagination problems) but it's up
and running.  In retrospect it is of course simple as falling off a log, or
a cow.

I shall now take my towel, go out have a few Pan Galactic Gargleblasters,
and ponder the next phase in the death
of another HP 3000.

James Trudeau - Minister of Zorgnakian affairs
Noito Plata - The Unix guy
Computer Sciences Corp
Harlingen, Tx