From: mikec@mundil.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Michael CIAVARELLA)
Subject: Re: QMS-3200 / QMS-2000 & tcp/ip
Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
Distribution: inet
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 07:23:25 GMT

avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au (Darren Reed) writes:

>dave@grunge.auspost.com.au (Dave Cole) writes:
>>The place where I work has a number of QMS-3200 and QMS-2000 printers, these
>>babies have a TCP/IP interface; you can open ftp and telnet sessions with
>>them.

Yep.  They're a lovely piece of equipment :)  It's nice when the 
bottleneck in a major print job isn't a serial line......


>>Has anyone out there tried to talk directly to these printers via TCP/IP?
>>If yes, are you willing to share your hard won experience in the form of
>>source code?  I would be a Happy Boy if you do help me.

Distributed with the TCP/IP option is a tape containing BSD and SYSV-ish
software to print directly to these printers...it may be worth giving
QMS a call at some stage to get the latest version of the software...


>Its not very hard at all...you can send any sort of job via ftp or to
>port 35 I have found...

From memory, I think port 35 was a UDP service....Darren will be able
to confirm that though.


>But as yet...they still dont talk back...so pstack and print and all those
>other wonderful postscript dont work although I believe you can use them
>over a serial connection to the printer or when using "executive" mode
>over the serial line.

Yep.  On a standard QMS PS-2000, you can "talk" directly to the 
Postscript interpreter only through the LocalTalk and serial interfaces.
The parallel interface is unidirectional and therefore cannot support
interactive use of the interpreter :-(  There is no support for
interactive sessions over TCP/IP.  I'm not sure, but I *think* that
one of the other communications boards (Novell?) does allow interactive
use of the interpreter....  

subtle hint to QMS if they're out there somewhere... ;-)

	(1)	Please please please PLEASE add password support 
		or some sort of authentication on the Ports 25/35.

	(2)	Please please please add some way of reliably getting
		statistics from the printer  (eg. pages printed,
		current interface activity) without having to go to
		the trouble of a telnet connection.  For example,
		sending a query packet to, say, port X would return 
		a single answer packet.

	(3)	TCP is two-way....a link to the interpreter
		would be a Nice Thing.

	(4)	It would be nice if the TCP option could mail things
		to an administrator once a day, but given the size of
		the code that would be needed for this....a good compromise
		is Suggestion (2) with some program(s) to poll the printer
		at regular intervals......

		eg.	{mymachine:1} qmsstatus myprinter -paper
			Trying 123.213.12.23.....
			Upper Bin: Empty
			Lower Bin: OK
			Option Bin: OK

			{mymachine:2} qmsstatus myprinter -lastjob
			Trying 123.213.12.23.....
			Type: HP/GL
			Pages: A4(10)
			Pages: A3(2)
			Pages: Letter(1)
			Author: Joe Bloggs
			Creator: <unknown>
			Time: 35.3seconds

			{mymachine:3} qmsstatus myprinter -maintenance
			Pages: 1234445
			Toner: Low
			Jams: None

If by chance a QMS ROM-coder reads this, then I'm quite willing to 
spend some time discussing useful mods. to the tcp/ip board.....


Later,

Mike.

				
Disclaimers:  	I don't work for any manufacturers mentioned above.  
		I'm just a happy user of the products mentioned, though I 
		could be happier :) 

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