Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!shadooby!accuvax.nwu.edu!tank!eecae!netnews.upenn.edu!eniac.seas.upenn.edu!jeff
From: jeff@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Jeffrey M White)
Newsgroups: comp.protocols.appletalk
Subject: Changing Apple LaserWriter type
Message-ID: <10325@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 24 Apr 89 20:36:11 GMT
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: jeff@eniac.seas.upenn.edu (Jeffrey M White)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
Lines: 46


  In order to simplify our connections, and to have a better integration
of Mac's and PC's, we have recently switched almost all our LaserWriters
from direct serial connections to Appletalk, using the CAP papif program
in place of Adobe's pscomm.  I have also gotten lwsrv to work, so that our
Unix hosts can publish their spooled printers as LaserWriters for Mac's and
PC's on the Appletalk.
  Right now, the Mac to LW printing situation is a strange one.  There is
one cluster of about 20 Mac's that are on a local Appletalk with a LaserWriter.
However, they have to pay $0.50/page to print on it.  They can print for no
charge on the LaserWriters connected to our unix machines, but they must
first generate the PostScript file on the Mac and then download and print it,
not what I would call user friendly).  What people here seem to be afraid of
is that people will print out unlimited copies with no control, or people from
the rest of the university will do all their printing here.
  What I had in mind, as a compomise, was to make the only LaserWriters on
the Appletalk network the ones published by lwsrv, so that some accounting
can still be done.  Lwsrv returns the Mac chooser name as the user, not the
unix login name, so I have modified the lwsrv program to allow a Mac Chooser
to unix login name mapping.  My plan is that anyone wishing to print directly
from the Mac must come to the office and tell us: 1. their unix account name,
and 2. what name they plan to use for the Chooser Name.  Then, when a print
job comes in over lwsrv, it sees if that Chooser name is in the file, and if
so, allows the job to go through (also doing a setuid to that user, so that
the accounting information is recorded properly).  It's not perfect (as there
is no absolute security on the Chooser Name), but it does give us a way to trace
usage.
  Enough of the background information.  What I need to do is to somehow allow
papif to communicate with a LaserWriter over Appletalk, but make sure that a
Mac on the same network cannot see it.  The easiest way of doing this I thought
was to change the type of the LaserWriter, that is, make it type 'Laser' (or
whatever) instead of 'LaserWriter'.  Papif would be modified to allow it
talk to a device type Laser instead of LaserWriter.
  What I need to know is:
    1. Will this work?
    2. If so, has anybody does it?  What is the command/sequence to change
       the type of the LW?  There is Postscript parameter called 'product'
       which is supposed to return the type of the printer, but I'm not that
       familiar with Postscript to know if it is what I want and even how to
       write a script to change it if it was.

  Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

						Jeff White
						University of Pennsylvania
						jeff@eniac.seas.upenn.edu