On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Fred A. Miller wrote:

C. J. Kenneth Tan wrote:

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Fred,

On Tue, 28 Jul 1998, Fred A. Miller wrote:

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C. J. Kenneth Tan wrote:

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I guess I must be the odd one here. But in the environments that I have been in, the rule of thumb is: PS printer for network printing and high speed local printing, non-PS printer for regular local printing. Over the years, The printers that I have to deal with are probably a very small sample of what's in the market: C-Itoh, Lexmark, HP, Tektronix, QMS and Xerox. Out of these, maybe one or two of them are non-laser printers -- C-Itoh line printer, and Lexmark Ink Jet color printer. Looking at these, I guess I am in a different environment then. Actually, one other type of printer that I have to deal with are the NeXT printers connected to the NeXTStations.

During the days of "centralized" computing, you'd be correct, as you're experience shows. Today, much of what was centralized isn't, thus there's more and more desktop printing being done than in the past. And, these printers are NOT PS printers. We don't have a PS printer connected to our dual P-5 server, and there won't be as there's no need for one. Most want and HAVE their own desktop printer.

I think the difference between your environment and mine is that mine was traditionally a "big machine" house. Therefore, 7 units of 8 processor RS/6000 is not something that out-of-ordinary. Now, if you think moving such facilities to a non-centralized type of computing is going to help, try calculating how much money will be spent. The problem is this amount of computing power is needed by quite a number of people. The next problem after money, is space -- where are you going to put all those big machines? The smallest machine used for work, is a dual processor Pentium. Most of our work are done on Alpha clusters, RS/6000 cluster, SGI Power Challenge and an SGI Origin2000. De-centralize that? Not a great idea. In that case, what's the solution for printing? PCL printers attached to the Alpha or the SGI? That's an absolute no-no. Every bit of the machine must be squeezed out for real computing work. So load off the printing to the PS printer. Then you'll also have the question of whether to have many small PS printers or to have a few big PS printers, like the C-Itoh PS printer which pumps out 30 ppm. Then you'll also be asking how will you configure the machines like the RS/6000 to send the print job of every user to the printer attached to the user's machine. I'm sure this can be done but it'd be a configuration nightmare. On the other hand, you can easily configure all the little machines which all the users are sitting at to print to the network PS printer, and configuring the larger machines like the Power Challenge to send print jobs to a print server is also easy.

I thought my writing skills weren't that bad....lemme try again. We are "spread out" over a large area. People in the offices are used to having a printer on their desktop....they will NOT willingly give them up. Management will NOT make them give them up. They will NOT go to a net printer to get their work every time they need something printed. If an OS change is to be made on the workstations, the printers MUST be supported....period.

It's not that your writing skills are bad. It's probably you need better reading skills. All that I am trying to say here is that we have very different environments and I was explaining about the environment that I work in. I was also saying that the days of "centralized computing" is not yet over as you were implying at first. There are some environments which the distributed model will work better. But there are also some others which they don't fit in at all. You just got to look out and acknowledge that this is not an all uniform world, and it will never be.

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One thing that I really don't understand is why do you need Samba to get the printer to talk to NT Server. Can't you use remote TCP/IP printing in NT?

'Must not be me this addressed to. I don't want to use Samba...I want to REMOVE WIN95 from all desktops.

No, no. Don't try to unify the operating systems running on different machines, unless you have too much time. It's cheaper to hire secretaries who can use a Windows box than to hire one who knows how to work a UNIX box, or to hire one and re-train the secretary so that s/he (trying to not sexually biased here) knows how to use a UNIX box.

Once again, I guess my writing skills aren't very good.

Sometimes, I just don't see why in some cases, the OS should be changed for any practical reasons. And that is what I was saying. Again, you need better reading and understanding skills.

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Will you still have any problems if you were to just use printers like HP Laserjet to do all the printing on UNIX machines and non-UNIX machines? I thought the Windows boxes have pretty good support for the Lasetjet printers all along.

Why should I continue to use WIN95?

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Graphics printing? Send it all to the Tektronix color printers. Hey, it does the job. But I am in no way a graphics expert. The stuff that I print out are mostly plain text, manuals or any other documents in PS format. Most of the time, the only kind of graphics that I have to print are PS graphics. So again, I don't have any problems at all. And if I want my document in color, again, just send it to the Tektronix color printers.

If I did that, I'd get "hung at noon!!!" These folks want their work off the printer NOW, and they don't care to walk any distance to get it, nor wait while another job is printing. Why should we have to buy new hardware? Our PRESENT hardware should be supported PROPERLY.

Our present hardware, and traditional hardware: big machines, big hardware. At one point in time, we even had a Fujitsu and an NEC in house! If you know what those machines are, you'll be really amazed.

I know what they are, but I'm not amazed.<g>

I don't think you have ever used any of the NEC SX machine before, have you? Have you ever done any computation work on them?

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As for the AIX boxes, to my knowledge, they just print directly to a PS printer or they will need Ghostscript. But I haven't seen anyone having their RS/6000 box connected to a PCL printer before.

The RS-6000 isn't at issue here.....it's tied to 2 Dataproducts and a new Printronix 5000 series. What IS at issue, is the wide array of desktop printers that MUST be properly supported.

So how do you make the comparisons of the performance of RS/6000 and a Linux box (on a PC, presumably) for printing purposes?

Setup.....it's easy on the "big box."

Care to elaborate? I think setup is easy on any machine provided that they are PS printer -- just send the print job there! No print filter to tinker around with at all. But that's not the point. How can you say that printing is faster than printing on Linux? Do both machines have the same printer? Do both have PS printers? Or do both have PCL printers? To make a fair comparison, you need to attach the same printer to both Linux and AIX to be able to judge the printing performance.

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BTW: Do you know what do they do at the CTC? Is it ever possible to de-centralize their work? I highly doubt it. If you think it's possible, go ahead and try talking to those guys there and see what they say. Go ahead and see how big their RS/6000 machine is.

Being blunt, I couldn't care less! What I do care about is our setup, which for our business (yes, it's a profit/non-profit dept.) is very efficient and cost effective. The ONLY changes I and management would like to make, if possible, is to replace NT on the server and WIN95 on desktops. I've shown a number of the staff SuSE with StarOffice loaded in KDE. They ALL thought it was very intuitive and would have NO problem working with it. Most like the appearance and functionality of KDE MUCH better than Windoze. At this point, printing seems to be the major "road block" at this point.

I think you should be more open, and you'll understand my environment better if you take a peek into what they are doing at the CTC. Oh, do you even know what the CTC is? I just thought you should know since you always talk about things at Cornell. The CTC is a perfect example of where the big machines will always live on. If you want better places to look at, try the Sandia National Lab or Los Alamos National Lab or Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Do you know what's common among all these places other than the fact that they are all "National Labs"? Maybe it's time to look out, instead of being immersed in the little Linux-everything world. If you really want to try to put Linux in environments where extremely high performance computation is critical, here's a little project for you: make a 0.1 TeraFLOP machine based on Linux. If you can do that, I'm sure you'll be famous! BTW: SNL has a machine rated at 1.34 TeraFLOPS (a world record set about a year ago). If you really think you can make it, here's a little piece of information for you: that machine is built with Pentium Pro 200 with 256k cache. No offence, but I think one thing that you really have to learn is to be more open and see what others have to say and try to understand their situation before you say anything. I shall drop this thread now. Kenneth Tan

Fred

-- Fred A. Miller, Systems Administrator Cornell Univ. Press Services fmiller@lightlink.com fm@cupserv.org

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