Networking DOS to Unix (Know about commercial products...)

[Richard Foulk]

>   >
>   >For PC-NFS it has always (since 1986) been the case that you have the
>   >options of print-on-timeout, print-on-process-exit, print-on-hotkey and
>   >print-on-special-command. It has never been necessary to print to file, except
>   >for a few oddball apps.
>   >
>
>   And these options have NEVER worked correctly.
>
>Nonsense.  Certainly from version 3.00 (current is 3.5) they have
>worked correctly.

I admittedly have not tried version 3.5.  We paid for a few upgrades
that only caused more problems than they solved and then took matters
into our own hands and fixed the bugs ourselves (after getting strong
hints from the Sun support phones that they weren't interested and
had no plans for another release.)

The most useful and perhaps foolproof way of handling printing is to
use the timeout option.  Set it to, perhaps, ten or 15 seconds and
things just work nicely ... except that Sun simply started the timer
from the beginning of the job, instead of using the time since the last
character was sent!

We wondered why the default timeout was set in minutes instead of
seconds.  Send a medium-sized print job and watch it get cut off in the
middle.  (Or set the timeout to 15-minutes or more to cover the worst
case.)  With those constraints and a few other bugs thrown in printing
was generally flaky.

So we patched their redirector so that it worked correctly.  We paid
money for upgrades that weren't.

The truth is that PC-NFS is a great product, that apparently had its
printer code written by the Sun receptionist.  (And marketing done by
Howdy Doody.)

It's a product that given the slightest bit of interest from Sun could
have given Novell a real run for its money.  Simpler, better, faster
more flexible, way cheaper and fairly solid (once you fix the printing).


-- 
Richard Foulk		richard at pegasus.com