filePro Printing over a Satellite

[Brian K. White]

Walter Vaughan wrote:
> I'm thinking about using direcTV's professional installation (with
> fixed IP address) on our 40foot trailer that goes all over the US,
> and process the orders directly on our servers here.
> These are locations that don't have phone lines, and don't even
> have digital cell service in some places.
>
> I'm fairly confident that I can ssh or use the web okay, but printing
> picking tickets and receipts might be my downfall.
>
> I'm looking for naysayers why I couldn't print to a printer as
> follows:
>
> Unix                                               Windows  HP Laser
> Server - Internet - DirecTV - Dish - Modem - Hub - Laptop - Printer
>
> I know I couldn't print directly via samba to the printer
> since I'll have to use NAT on the other side of the modem in
> order to share it (probably via a foolproof Linksys switch),
> but I should be able to do some sort of local print with
> Anzio or PuTTy methinks.

NAT is not the problem, it's the fact that isp's rightly block port 139,
which is what samba and windows file & print sharing runs on.

If you have a fixed IP then you can set up a print server or enable windows
print services for unix on any win2k or xp machine or install print server
software on any machine.

You can passthru print via anzio very easily and it should work fine for
most things, but might fail with graphics.
I haven't tried with anzio recently but I've had facetwin fail to pass
graphics almost every time and I don't think it's facetwin but an
unavoidable nature of the mechanism itself. the printer-off sequence must
occur within binary graphics just by chance.

Putty has an even worse problem that only hurts in filepro or other apps
that do their own passthru print negotiation to flip back and forth so they
can update a screen during a passthru print job. putty ejects a page every
time the printer-off sequence occurs. this means a page for every record of
a filepro report if you are using PFPT or -pq to do local print. You can get
around that in filepro by simply avoiding letting filepro send the escape
codes itself, by removing PN and PS from the fp termcap if necessary
although that kills it for all other terminals that use the same $TERM
value. Instead of letting filepro handle it, print to a file and use a
system command to cat the file through the passthru program. This way there
is only one printer-on sequence at the beginning of the job, and only one
printer-off sequence at the end of the job, instead of an on-off between
each record.

Anzio and facetwin don't have that problem because they both have a timeout
value where an eject-page is not sent until X seconds after a printer-off
sequence. If a printer-on occurs before the timeout, then the channel is
re-opened to the printer and no page-eject is sent and the timer is reset.
(The print job itself may contain page-ejects and they work just like any
other codes)

Perhaps putty has a timeout option too but I've not noticed it. I haven't
looked hard though, so do feel free to take a look. Maybe it's there.

The facts of NAT and Sattelites on either or both ends of your connection
are no problem at all though.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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