SOLUTION: Print Jobs Merging

[Mark Hazen]

Greetings folks... I've got a solution for a problem I was having, and
after 2 weeks of rigorous testing, I feel confident that it is a viable
solution. Many thanks to Peter Blake, Joe Bacom, and Anthony Montgomery
for their solutions, ideas, and input into this isssue.

My originally reported problem was this: We're running Samba 1.9.16p11
under Solaris 2.5. In our environment, we have a number of HP printers
with JetDirect cards. These printers get jobs passed to them both through
SAMBA, and from spooled Unix-side jobs (the server spools jobs which come
in from a mainframe across campus, and passes them down to the printers).

My problem was that the print jobs being passed off through SAMBA, and the
print jobs from the Unix-side were able to step on one another, meaning
that if you printed from a  SAMBA client, and the server also  received a
print job from the mainframe at that same time, you'd get part of one job,
part of the second job, and the rest of the first job, accompanied by (or
translated into) much gibberish.

The simple (yet elegant) solution to this problem (thanks to Joe Bacom) is
to set up separate spools for SAMBA and for the Unix-side jobs, which
point to the same device. For example, one of our printers with this
problem is named "oaa1lj". For this printer, there might be two print
queues:
 
       Job Source:        Queue name:       Printer Name:

      Unix/Mainframe -----> OAA1LJ ----------> OAA1LJ 
      SAMBA Clients  -----> OAA-WEST --------> OAA1LJ 

So, both queues point to the same place, in the long run... and the choice
thing about this is that we haven't had a single problem with print jobs
stepping on one another since I set up all of the secondary queues.
    
-mh.

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Mark Hazen                    ph:(706) 542-1546
207 New College               Network Administrator, Dean's Office
The University of Georgia     Franklin College of Arts and Sciences