Large Scale Print Spool Service

The paper describes a project to enhance the print service for CERN. The printer infrastructure consists of over 1000 printers serving more than 5000 Unix users running on workstations of various brands as well as PCs running Linux. In addition, the infrastructure must serve more than 3000 PCs running Windows/95 and NT 4. We support a large number of printer manufacturers, including HP, QMS, Tektronix, Xerox and Apple. Lightweight print clients are provided for all the supported platforms and transparently distributed using the ASIS software repository and the NICE application architecture. They may be used as ‘‘drop-in’’ replacements of the standard vendor clients. Compatibility with older CERN lightweight print clients is provided. Printing with standard vendor clients is also possible. Administrative tools are provided for the general management of print servers and in particular for replicating server configurations and monitoring spool file systems. The service offers a high level of scalability and fault tolerance, since it has no single point of failure in the server back-end.