Re: Printing Reports on a remote machine???

From: R Scott Hunter <RSHUNTER_at_delphi.com>
Date: Thu, 30 DEC 93 15:40:44 EST
Message-ID: <931230.56444.RSHUNTER_at_delphi.com>


We print all sorts of things on laser printers attached to AT&T 63xx DOS print servers running AT&T/NCR StarGROUP printer client server. They are interconnected with a group of about 30 different UNIX machines via StarLAN 10 Ethernet and StarGROUP. However, if you wanted to print to a workstation running, say, any sort of terminal emulation software that was then dialed up through a modem to a UNIX box, or connected serially to it, that should not be a problem. Terminal sessions map to the set of device nodes on UNIX that typically look like:
/dev/tty00

and so forth. You can see what convention your own system uses by checking out what who and ps tell you once you've logged on. Anyhow, log on, and activate your terminal emulation software's option to echo output to an attached printer, and make sure the software understands what sort of printer you're using. Then, any process or user on UNIX that is privileged to write to
/dev/tty00 or whatever port you're on would be able to generate
printed output on your workstation.
To get fancier, check out your UNIX System Administration reference documentation on the LP spooling and lpadmin facilities. This set of software would let you configure this port as a named UNIX printer on your system. (Only do this if you've got procedures worked out to ensure that this workstation is dedicated for this use and the port you're using will always be available for printing!) Finally, as far as ORACLE reports go, I usually have whatever Oracle tool I'm using spool to disk, and then I use UNIX's facilities to print that file; this saves me from a lot of tedious reprocessing if something gets mucked up in the printing-- I only need to submit the disk file again, rather than rerunning a huge query. For reports written in sqlplus, you just use the SQL*Plus "spool" command; for things like SRW (SQL*Report*Writer), use the option to name a disk file for your output.
(It is helpful to have a special directory set aside to contain your spoled output, which you can then clean out occasionally rather than having to track files down all over your system.) Hope this helps to answer your question. *-----

R. Scott Hunter, Sr. DBA	email to: shunter_at_cfotax.attmail.com
AT&T Tax Services Company	Morristown, NJ
*/All opinions are my own unless indicated expicitly otherwise. /* Received on Thu Dec 30 1993 - 21:40:44 CET

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