[brlug-general] sharing a printer among multiple users sending contiguous jobs

[Edmund Cramp]

John,

Most printers work on a FIFO so jobs get printed as they arrive - hence your problem.

The only way that I can see you solving your problem would be for the users to print to file, concatenate the files (might need a little magic) and then submit the concatenated files as one job when the user has completed their processes.  I've seen this done years ago in the VMS world via a batch file written in the VMS command language.

Edmund Cramp
--
A conscience is what hurts when all your other parts feel so good.

-----Original Message-----
From: general-bounces at brlug.net [mailto:general-bounces at brlug.net] On Behalf Of John Hebert
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 10:15 PM
To: general at brlug.net
Subject: Re: [brlug-general] sharing a printer among multiple users sending contiguous jobs

Fernando,

Thanks for the reply.

Are you saying that multiple jobs from the same user are printed together? Or, are the jobs printed as they arrive?

My need is to let the users print multiple jobs as one set, then another set of multiple jobs, and so on.

I was thinking of training the users to set priorities for their jobs, but that would be a lot of mouse-clicking for each job.

John

----- Original Message ----
From: Fernando Vilas <fvilas at iname.com>
To: general at brlug.net
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2007 10:08:28 PM
Subject: Re: [brlug-general] sharing a printer among multiple users sending contiguous jobs

El Thursday 19 April 2007 19:10:04 John Hebert escribió:
> Howdy,
>
> I'm trying to solve a problem at work using open source.
>
> My employer wants to let multiple users print multiple jobs, or files, 
> but these jobs have to printed as a contiguous group.
>
> For example, JoeUser wants to print out some accounting reports at the 
> same time MaryUser wants to print out some source code. They both send 
> multiple files, or jobs, to the same printer, but the end result is 
> that the print output is a mixed stack of accounting reports and 
> source code, which requires separating the jobs by hand.
>
> Surely this problem has been solved by software vendors out there, but 
> I was wondering if anyone knew of an open source solution. If it 
> requires CUPS on Linux, then I can go that route.
>
> Any ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> John Hebert
>

I'm running 2 linux boxes here, with CUPS, but I've never had the issue of jumbled pages when printing simultaneously.

At work, we're using Trusted Solaris 8, and the printers have their own IP, but again, we have 30+ devs printing lots of files for review, and each job is printed individually, not jumbled.

I would have to recommend CUPS on your choice of *nix at this point, but I don't remember seeing that problem, even with a shared printer on MS software.

--
Thanks,
Fernando Vilas
fvilas at iname.com

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