Technical data

Managing Peripheral Devices
8.8 Managing Printers
If your system runs application programs that might write output directly to a
printer, Compaq recommends that you spool your printers. Compaq recommends
that you also spool your LAT printers to prevent privileged users from writing
directly to a LAT printer. Writing directly to a LAT printer can cause problems
for output queues that use the printer.
Figure 14–9 illustrates a sample configuration using spooled printers.
Section 8.8.2.1 describes how to set up a spooled printer.
8.8.2.1 Spooling Printers
To spool a printer, use the SET DEVICE/SPOOLED command. This command
associates the printer with a storage device (such as a disk) and an output queue.
You must spool a printer before you start the queue to be associated with the
printer.
Enter the DCL command SET DEVICE/SPOOLED in the following format:
SET DEVICE/SPOOLED[=(queue-name[:],intermediate-disk-name[:])] output-device-name
You should always specify the intermediate disk and queue explicitly. If the queue
you associate with the spooled output device is a generic queue, a file written to
that device is sent to the generic queue, which in turn places the job in one of its
target queues. As a result, a job copied to the LPA0: device, for example, might
not necessarily print on the printer LPA0:, but instead might print on one of the
other printers targeted by the generic queue.
When you select an intermediate storage device, make sure that it has sufficient
free space for the volume of spooled output. If you plan to enforce disk quotas
on the intermediate device, make sure that all expected users have a quota
authorized on the intermediate device. The intermediate device must be mounted
before files can be written to it.
After establishing an output device as spooled, you should test the device, because
errors in disk or queue names are not detected until spooling is attempted. This
step is described in Section 8.8.2.3.
You should create a command procedure to set up your output devices each time
the system reboots. Include the commands to set up spooled devices in this
command procedure. For more information, see Section 8.8.1.
Example
The following example illustrates sample commands used to set up spooled
printers. This example also includes the command used to set device
characteristics. You generally include the commands to spool printers along
with the command to set device characteristics in a startup command procedure
to set up output devices.
8–36 Managing Peripheral Devices