Connecting a printer to a sun 3/60, 3.5 BSD unix

[Fred Sena]

Reading DSR on a sun 3/60 asynch serial port
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Reply-To: sena at infinet.UUCP (Fred Sena)
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Organization: Memotec, Inc.  North Andover, MA
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I am connecting a printer (DEC la210) to a sun 3/60 running BSD 3.5 unix.
The problem I have is that the lpd daemon does not check to see if the
printer is powered on before sending the file out the port.  That means the
printout is lost whenever the printer is turned off.

What I would like to do is make lpd sense that the printer is not there
before sending output to the printer port.

If that can't be done, I would like to write a program to detect the status
of the asynch serial port that the printer is connected to.  I have been
looking into that, but I can't figure out how to read the status of the DSR
pin on the port.  I tried using ioctl(), but it does not have a "command" for
reading the port status as far as I can tell.

Does anyone have any ideas?  If so, please email me.  Even if there is a way
to get lpd to take care of this problem, I would still appreciate any
information about how to read the control pins on an asynchronous serial
port.

	thanks in advance,
	--fred
-- 
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Frederick J. Sena                sena at infinet.UUCP
Memotec, Inc.  N. Andover, MA