Thanks to:
cecil.pang@westel.com
rickv@mwh.com (Rick von Richter)
ssnodgra@fore.com (Steve Snodgrass)
chris_marble@hmc.edu
glenn@uniq.com.au (Glenn Satchell)
jfs@fluent.com (John Stoffel)
The questions:
=======================================
> Managers,
> We currently have as a print server a SPARC 10 w Solaris 2.5.1 and
> jetadmin software. I would like to reduce our dependence on this
system
> as a print server. Can I create a 2nd print server on another system
> with causing conflict with the first?
>
> If so, how would I identify the printers and properly route requests
> through one server or the other?
> Thanks
=======================================
For my situation, the 3 most useful summaries are:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------
FROM RICK
No problem, I have 12 Sparc stations (2.5.1), which support about 400
users, and
about 85 printers. Two of the sparcstations are jetadmin servers and
the other
10 are clients. The two jetadmin servers are set up identically and
five of the
clients send their requests to one server and the other 5 to the other
server.
This is the line I use to set up a printer for a client;
lpadmin -p <printer> -s printserver1 -I any -D "<desc>"
or
lpadmin -p <printer> -s printserver2 -I any -D "<desc>"
In my hosts file for the two printservers I added the aliases
printserver1 &
printserver2 to the entries for my two print servers; Example;
10.3.3.1 starfire printserver1 # Sparc 20 Jet Admin Printserver #1
10.3.3.2 sunfire printserver2 # Sparc 20 Jet Admin Printserver #2
Then if one of the printservers goes down, all I have to do is go into
the host
file and move the alias to the other printserver. No reconfiguration
necessary
on the clients. Example: printserver1 goes down. I would modify my
hostfile to
look like this:
#10.3.3.1 starfire printserver1 # Sparc 20 Jet Admin Printserver #1
(down)
10.3.3.2 sunfire printserver1 printserver2 # Sparc 20 Jet Admin
Printserver #2
The clients will keep on printing but just redirected their jobs to a
different
printserver and I had to change only one line.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
FROM Glenn
This is easily done. Just install the jetadmin software on the second
system, make sure that you use the same print queue name(s). In your
DNS / NIS / NIS+ setup define an alias called printhost (or whatever
you like) for one of these systems. All your print clients then spool
their requests to the remote system 'printhost'. If this system fails
then redefine the alias for printhost to be the other system with
jetadmin installed and print requests should start going via the new
system.
Alternatively, you could just get half the systems to spool to the
second system. Only one will be able to talk to the printer at a time
so the software will just back off and retry the connection until it
gets through should bopth try and print at the same time.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------
FROM Steve:
This should work fine. Here at FORE, we have a pair of identical print
servers each running Solaris, JetAdmin, and Samba, and I will probably
soon
bring up a third. If one server is talking to a printer, the other one
will
just wait until its done and the connection becomes available. This is
assuming you are running a recent version of JetAdmin, some ancient
versions
(the B.* series) started daemons that opened permanent connections to
the
printers, so you couldn't use multiple servers.
You could even potentially load-balance the servers by using round robin
DNS,
but we are not doing this because most of our access comes through
Samba, and
unfortunately NetBIOS naming doesn't lend itself to load sharing like
DNS
does.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
-------
James Young, as of 30 June, 1997 at james_young@gilead.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:11:58 CDT