CERN Accelerating science

This article is mainly a re-production of an article which had been published in CNL 235. However as some information were not any more valid we are publishing in this CNL issue a new up-to-date version for this article.

SPRINGER : For a long time now Springer has been the major Print Server in the computer centre. It continues however to run a very old version of Ultrix that is not Y2K compliant. For this reason every effort is being made to move printers away from this particular server and onto the new PRINT service composed of a series of LINUX PC's which are Y2K compliant. Following the current schedule this move should be completed by December 1999 and Springer taken out of service.)

As a result of these changes the following has become necessary:
xprint as used by unix users has been rewritten.

• Supported platforms can use the xprint command in PATH /usr/local/bin/xprint from the ASIS software repository.
• If your UNIX environment is not standard you have to download xprint by anonymous ftp to asisftp.

From now on, the new PRINTER WIZARD enables users to print from W95, W98 and WNT PC platforms, whether they are connected to NICE or not.

• Additionally, there is now only one print queue from both platforms (PC and UNIX).

WPRINT for VMS:

• The new version of WPRINT (the VMS equivalent of xprint) uses PERL to access the new print servers (and is already running on VXCERN), so it requires the installation of PERL on your VMS machines,once per architecture (VAX or Alpha).

Note: More explanations and answers to your questions can be found at the URL address:
http://wwwcio.cern.ch/Printers/cnl.html

Furthermore, the gateway (PCCIO04) between Windows NT users and Springer has become redundant and has been taken out of service at the end of September. Consequently we strongly recommend users to use PRINTER WIZARD on Windows NT.

An update of any modifications or new features, where printing is concerned, will appear in future issues of the Cern Computing Newsletter.