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From: csrobe@icase.arpa (Charles S. Roberson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions
Subject: loadsharing printers
Message-ID: <8258@brl-adm.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 10-Jul-87 21:58:10 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-adm.8258
Posted: Fri Jul 10 21:58:10 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 12-Jul-87 13:00:00 EDT
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I help administer a SUN 3 system with 14 workstations running SUN release
3.3 of BSD 4.2 UNIX.  We do a quite a bit of document preparation.
(Mostly TeX and troff stuff).  Anyway we just purchased a second
laser writer and are in the process of integrating it into our system.

What we would like to do is provide some form of loadsharing
mechanism for our two printers.  The two printers are identical
so we can make them transparent to the applications.  What experiences
has anyone had with doing this.  We have considered a sharing load
based on accumulated page counts for both printers and also based
on current queue size.

The quickest way we can think of is to use a shell around lpr to
determine which printer to use.  Has anyone tried having one queue
serve more than one printer?  How were the daemons handled?

Thanks in advance.

Chip Roberson

csrobe@icase.arpa
...seismo!gmu90x!wmcs!csrobe