Printing and Backups on the SGI

[Eric A. Pearce]

  We have several IRIS 4D's here and I would like to do the following:

  1.  Be able to print to a remote Unix host and be recognized by the
      Berkeley lpd daemon.  In our case, I would like to spool jobs to
      a QMS 800 (PostScript) laser printer hanging off a Sun4/280.
      It looks like there is plenty of support for directly connected
      printers, but I don't see anything on network printing other than
      just rsh'ing as user "lp" and executing a print command (i.e. 
      /usr/spool/lp/etc/util/mknetpr).  I think this is kind of crufty. 
      Does SGI offer an lpd clone or has someone ported the ucb one?
      
  2.  I would like to use bsd dump/restore (and rdump/rrestore) for
      backups.  Has anybody done this?  The IRIS's really mess up our
      backup scheme as we are able to do remote backup operations on
      all our other machines.   They can all use each others drives
      and read each others tapes in case of a tape drive failures or
      network problems. 

      I'm not saying BRU is better or worse than dump/restore, just that
      it takes away this flexibility.   I have not tried it yet, but it
      looks I could make BRU use a remote tape drive on a arbitrary
      BSD system (maybe a 6250 1/2" on a Sun?).   

      Other options I am considering are tar and GNU tar, since the
      other systems would be able to read the tapes.  GNU tar is
      looking pretty attractive, since it supports full and incremental 
      backups/restores and will run on all of our systems.  
  
  If I missed something in the documentation, please feel free to
  point this out.   With the exception of the above, the IRIS was very easy
  to set up in a networked environment.  

  -e
-- 
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