lpadmin(8) question

[Bob Peirce #305]

In article <1990Jun2.034151.27340 at virtech.uucp> cpcahil at virtech.UUCP (Conor P. Cahill) writes:
>In article <453 at van-bc.UUCP> sl at van-bc.UUCP (Stuart Lynne) writes:
>>In the man page for lpadmin:
>>
>>	-vdevice	..... Note that there is nothng to stop a system
>>			manager from associating the same device with more
>>			than one printer.
>>
>>Does this mean that there is nothing to stop you from doing this so don't do
>>it?
>
>No.  What it means is that you can do it, but you must set things up so 
>that they work correctly.  This has been used lots of times to have a
>printer with several kinds of paper that can be loaded and each type 
>of paper will get it's own queue while the device for all of the queues
>is the same.
>
>In this scenario, the system administrator must enable 1 and only 1 of 
>the queues at the same time (hopefully just after he placed the appropriate
>paper into the printer).
>
You also need (or at least probably should) decide which queue is
primary and set up your control scripts for the other devices to
disable themselves when their print job completes.

On our system, we tried several ideas and settled on manually 
disabling the primary device before starting up a secondary device
and having the secondary device disable itself unless given a flag
to keep itself turned on.  This works because we have to change
paper and we want to disable the primary device before we do that.

We are also set up so anyone can disable or enable a device.


-- 
Bob Peirce, Pittsburgh, PA				  412-471-5320
...!uunet!pitt!investor!rbp			rbp at investor.pgh.pa.us