Computing Seminar

Database centric printer spool management and what this means to CERN users

Samuel Lown, CERN/IT

Abstract

Over the last year the CERN print service has undergone a major upgrade to the servers in terms of hardware and software. What these changes involve, what the current state is, and how they effect the CERN users, are the subjects of this talk.

With around 15,000 jobs per day on 1200 printers and a total of 2000 queues, a scalable and robust spool management system is a necessity. With synchronisation and scalability problems in the past, the new system has been designed around a central database that acts as an intermediary between the management interface and configuration generation programs.

The new management interface has many advantages both to the support teams and to end users. Changes in the back-end filters and a new version of XPrint have brought new functionality to Unix and Linux users. The interface and tools will be presented in the talk with the hope that end users will be able to know about, and fully utilise all of the available features.

About the speaker: Samuel Lown has been working at CERN in the Unix Infrastructure section as a technical student during the last 12 months, on leave from his Computer Science course at Staffordshire University in the UK. During his time at CERN he has been responsible for the upgrade and development of the new Print Service infrastructure and management interface. Sam has 5 years of experience in Unix/Linux systems administration/programming and 12+ years experience in computers in general. Areas of particular interest include networking and Linux evangelism.