[53] in Enterprise Print Delivery Team
Re: IBM Announced an NT (instead of AIX) Based Version of Infoprint Manager
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Whitson)
Tue Feb 1 10:34:09 2000
To: "David F. Lambert" <LAMBERT@mitvma.MIT.EDU>
Cc: Enterprise Printing Delivery Project Team <printdel@MIT.EDU>
From: Mike Whitson <mwhitson@MIT.EDU>
Date: 01 Feb 2000 10:34:04 -0500
In-Reply-To: "David F. Lambert"'s message of "Tue, 01 Feb 00 10:11:06 EST"
Message-Id: <n91vh492az7.fsf@dragon.mit.edu>
Okay, I read it. Of course, being a product announcement, it makes
the product sound like the best thing since sliced toothpaste. Here's
what I read out of it:
- NT is a poor server platform for any kind of real work, and they
even say so in the product announcement:
> Customers who wish to do commercial printing, drive more high-speed
> printers, or who need a scalable distributed printing solution
> should consider Infoprint Manager for AIX Version 3.
I would strongly recommend against using an NT server. AIX is
annoying, but nowhere near as unsuitable as NT in my opinion.
- They claim to be using IPP, which isn't even a full standard yet;
it's still in draft form. This probably isn't too big of a deal,
since it doesn't seem to be required, merely offered.
- They claim to require a GUI in many applications. As a sysadmin, I
strongly dislike systems that require me to use a GUI (having one is
often nice; being required to use one sucks). I'd check with the
operators on this one, since it's really them that this affects.
> Note: The Infoprint Management console can be used for operator and
> administration tasks when using PSF Direct or MVS download. All
> other printing must use the Java GUI for operator and administration
> tasks.
- Of course, they make no mention of security.
- They mention a mainframe channel emulator card for a PC (the "IBM
Infoprint 4159 Model 001 S/390 Parallel Channel Emulator"). I'll
look into whether there's a driver for this card for other PC OSes
(Linux, BSD, etc.).
-mike
