Sidebar: A Useful Package

In the course of testing and working with all of these products, I came upon several that did not meet our specific needs but were nonetheless excellent packages. One of these is JSB's Multiview Desktop. This application has a feature called transparent printing that does pretty much what we wanted to do. However, it had one drawback: in order for a printer to be shared, the PC with the printer not only had to be on, but also had to be logged into UNIX.

JSB works as follows: when a login is made to UNIX, JSB creates a file in the device directory with the name you've assigned to your local printer. Anytime you use the standard lp command and specify that file name for the printer name, the print job is transferred to the local printer connected to your PC. For example, if you want to call your local printer "home," then the following command would send a print job to your printer:

cat filename | lp -d home

These print requests do go through Window's print manager, so print jobs sent from different origins can be handled correctly. The beauty of this product is that this feature is not a network-only feature, it works for serial connections as well. So if I have this program at home and I dial into a client's site or my home office, I can redirect any of my print jobs back to my home printer. But wait, it gets even better: JSB also has a host support module that can be installed on the UNIX machine. With the module installed, when you login using JSB's terminal emulator either via a network or serial connection, you can have up to eight simultaneous connections, each one in a separate Windows window. How many times have you dialed into a client's site and wished you had more than one login? Maybe being on the leading edge of technology isn't so bad after all.