Large Scale Parallel Print Service
I. Deloose, David G. Foster, Ignacio Reguero · 1997
During several years, the CERN PRINT service consisted of a wide variety of printing server platforms handling more than 1300 network printers. Whereas a single UNIX printer server mainly served the 5000 UNIX clients, printing services for the 3500 Windows 9x and 1500 Windows NT PCs went mostly through Novell and NT servers. At the end of 1997, the CERN Printing Project was launched to define a single server model for all clients. Linux PCs running the RFC1179 (lpd daemon) protocol were adopted as a common solution as queue servers for all CERN network printers. A CERN Printing Package has been designed to integrate the PC-Windows based printing clients into this lpr based environment. This software package is built around a central database, holding the configuration data (printer name, driver, settings,...) of all corporate network printers. This paper will give an overview of the new architecture including the Linux server environment, the UNIX clients and the CERN Printing. Additionally Java and Perl print clients have been developed in order to provide a GUI for Unix systems and to support other operating systems such as VMS.