"PC-NFS printing problems"

[Glenn Roberts]

> Here at the UofM we have several IBM XT's running PC-NFS with the server
> being a Sun3/280 running SunOS 4.0.1.  Under both PC-NFS 2.0 and 3.0, text
> destined for the printer instead shows up on the monitor of the XT.

This is a known problem with PC NFS.  It apparently only shows up if the
printer host is running SunOS 4.0.  See the article "XID's and Caching" in
Sun's March issue of the Software Technical Bulletin.

Sun's suggested workaround is to copy a very small (one line) dummy file
to LPTx: (where LPTx: is the network mounted printer) at PC boot time.
This will trigger the problem but from then on things should work all
right.  This fix seems to be working for us.  This problem is supposed to
be fixed in the next release of PC NFS, due out Real Soon Now.

Glenn Roberts, MITRE
groberts at mitre.org