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Work have just adopted NPDS (Novell Distributive Printing Services) protocols on the network. Has anyone any experience of setting up the !Printers connection in this situation. Previously I printed to File HostFS.....PCprintername but this no longer works. The printer names now take the form printer.<deptname>.<facultyname>.<institutionname>

Any help will be appreciated. Thanks ...

Gordon

What name shows up in RISC OS if you press F12 and type

*printers

?

Hi Aaron

Thanks for getting back to me. The response to *printers from RISC OS is

*printers
PDFCreator
\\MMU\pq_jd_chemistry_e213a
\\MMU\JD_CHM_E225_LJ4050TN_ACA_S????????
\\MMU\JD_CHM_E213a_LJ4050TN_ACA_????????
*

The last of the three printers is my new default PC printer. The first one was the same printer before the move to NDPS.

These are displayed in the Printers and Faxes window on the PC as

PDFCreator
pq_jd_chemistry_e213a on MMU
JD_CHM_E225_LJ4050TN.ACA.SCI.mmu on MMU
JD_CHM_E213a_LJ4050TN.ACA.SCI.mmu on MMU

Is there a problem with string length, perhaps?

Gordon

If you have a hostfs module with version 0.51 onwards it should support printer names up to 128 characters (it used to be max 32). The version distributed with the latest VirtualRPC-Adjust is 0.53. Make sure you have all the latest patches installed.

Graeme

Many thanks, Graeme, for reminding me about upgrades. My PC's hard disc failed in the summer and I'd forgotten that I hadn't reinstalled the upgrades.

With the May 2004 upgrade, the software now supports printer names up to 256 characters in length - needed for the new NDPS printer name.

*printers now reports the default PC printer in full as

\\MMU\JD_CHM_E213a_LJ4050TN_ACA_SCI_mmu

so printing to file

HostFS::\\MMU\JD_CHM_E213a_LJ4050TN_ACA_SCI_mmu

in the !Printers Connection dialogue box now works perfectly. So NDPS isn't a problem after all.

Note that the PC reports the printer as

JD-CHM-E213a-LJ4050TN.ACA.SCI.mmu on MMU

with hyphens and not underscores as I erroneosly mentioned yesterday.

Sanity returns - again, thanks for your help ...

Gordon