Date:  October 9, 1987  
Number:  195A 
 
Title:  PRINTING ON THE NONDEDICATED FILE SERVER 
 
 
THIS TECHNICAL BULLETIN PROVIDES FURTHER INFORMATION RELATING
TO BULLETIN #195 
 
It has been discovered that printing in BASIC or with Lotus 1-2-3 (version
2.01 and above) causes the nondedicated workstation to appear to hang for a
short time, after which a "device unavailable" error is generated to the screen 
and the print process is aborted.  This happens regardless of whether the 
workstation is spooled and on all versions of nondedicated NetWare. 
 
In order to do printing on a nondedicated server, either a local printer or a
server printer may be installed on a given LPT port, but not both.  This is
done to prevent any chance of interleaving the middle of a local print job with 
a server print job or vice versa. 
 
When the server comes up, it installs LPT1 by default as a server printer port.
At that time, it zeroes out the DOS LPT1 port address area in memory to 
indicate that LPT1 is not available to do local printing.

However, when Lotus 1-2-3 or BASIC does printing, a check is done to determine
that the LPT1 port exists.  If the port address is zero, the workstation will 
timeout and then the error message is generated to the screen.

The solution is to place a non-zero value in the LPT1 port address area so the
check will not abort the printing process.  To do this, the program PRFIX.COM 
was written.  It can be put into the login script or be ran after logging in, 
but before the first printing by any Lotus 1-2-3 or BASIC program.  PRFIX.COM 
only needs to be ran once, since the value it places in the LPT1 port address 
remains unchanged until the server is rebooted again.  Logging in and out will 
not change it.

PRFIX.COM is available from Netwire or LANSWER.

Lotus and Lotus 1-2-3 are trademarks of Lotus Development Corporation.

NetWire is a servicemark of Novell, Inc.

NetWare is a trademark of Novell, Inc.