[82] in Enterprise Print Delivery Team
Re: question--Technical
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mike Whitson)
Wed Feb 16 12:52:33 2000
To: "Cecilia E. Talamantes" <cctala@MIT.EDU>
Cc: printdel@MIT.EDU
From: Mike Whitson <mwhitson@MIT.EDU>
Date: 16 Feb 2000 12:52:29 -0500
In-Reply-To: "Cecilia E. Talamantes"'s message of "Wed, 16 Feb 2000 08:48:55 -0500"
Message-Id: <n91wvo511cy.fsf@dragon.mit.edu>
"Cecilia E. Talamantes" <cctala@MIT.EDU> writes:
> For you Technical folks, I found this article and wondered how it
> fit in here at MIT. Do we use it now (Athena)? It doesn't mention
> working with Mainframes.
I actually went to a presentation by Mr. Woodard at the 1998 Boston
LISA conference, and spent some time after his presentation chatting
with him about print systems. His printing system is more or less
homegrown, and has essentially the same core architecture as Berkeley
LPD or LPRng-based systems. He has added a few web-page tie-ins, and
taken a slightly different approach to system management (the kind of
thing Athena accomplishes with moira).
He doesn't recommend other sites adopt the system (the O'Reilly
article you mention was more interested in the fact that it ran on
Linux than in the print system itself). Last I heard from him, in
fact, he was working on adapting LPRng to be the new core of his
printing system.
If you're interested in the paper associated with Mr. Woodard's talk
(which has a lot more content than the O'Reilly article), check out:
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa98/full_papers/woodard/woodard_html/woodard.html
Looking back, the paper does have some interesting points which we
(and I in looking at the Athena print system) could probably stand to
reconsider; not so much in the realm of system architecture, but more
in the realm of methodology -- "How to get control of PCs' printing
clients" and so forth.
I've also got a paper copy of the conference proceedings in my office
if you have trouble accessing it (there may be a USENIX/SAGE
membership restriction on some of those pages).
-mike
