Re: Toshiba Printer on iSeries (AS400)

In addition to Midrange resources, you can find other forums on the
Internet.
There are great ones on Linked In, but thanks to their latest upgrades, most
of Linked In is broken right now.
You could try doing a Google search, using Printer name model AND IBM OS
version you on, to find if anyone else has a discoussion relevant to your
issues.

I am now retired, but when working on BPCS 405 CD, we seemed to spend more
time fighting printer hassles, than getting anything new accomplished.
People would rearrange printers, and in the process lose their settings,
because many of our printers talked to our AS400 thru a PC linkage, with the
PC having the right software settings for the printer to work correctly.  I
serviced the stuff on the 400, another guy handled the PCs & printers, but
the solutions needed stuff done in both realities.

		You might check the following considerations:

1.	Drivers
2.	Emulation
3.	Configured operation rules
4.	Page dimensions
5.	BPCS printer settings

1 -Drivers: Some printers, which are not designed to work with IBM systems,
need special drivers to support this.
These are like patchjes to the PC printer controls.  If you need one, better
document the way you got your hands on it, and where the relevant
instructions can be found again, because in time, someone will install
something on the PC, which will require them to wipe out any prior patches.
We had this problem with a printer which was used for both BPCS  special
forms, and a non-IBM PC application.  The 2 were incompatible.  Updates for
one would mess up the other.  Getting management to cough up $ 100 budget to
have one printer for each, was plain impossible, so we spent thousands of $
in man hours fixing the other, every time there was an upgrade to the one
not messed up.

2 - Emulation:
To connect a printer to an IBM OS, it either has to be an IBM printer ####,
or emulate one of the IBM printer ####s.
Most every non-IBM printer, through its PC settings, can emulate a list of
IBM printer ####s.
You need to find a #### on both lists, the same ####, and check IBM
documentation on that #### to make sure that your choice is able to do
whatever capability functions you are trying to do, like print a bar code,
accept not paper sheets, but continuous paper, print to certain page
dimensions.

As technology marches onwards, new ####s come out, and old ####s go away.
Your sig says AS400 Manager.  If in fact you are still managing a 400, and
not a later named reality, then you will be running out of ####s still
supported by PC printers, whose manufacturers cannot imagine they still need
to support a #### which is maybe 20 years obsolete.  You may reach the point
where instead of buying ANY PC printer on the market, you have to go
shopping armed with list of ####s supported by your 400, which locks you out
of maybe 99% of the PC printers on the market.

3 - Configuration Operation Rules.
The language and terminology varies from computer vendor to vendor.
What I am referring to is the concept that there are default settings for
printer behavior, but the PC settings cause the printer to just do whatever
IBM asks it to do in movement of paper, and send back error messages
properly for PC to pass them to IBM, so humans can find them in the right
places.

This can be complicated if you have non-IBM controllers in the mix, which
might not pass all the info you need.
Non-IBM hardware is often favored by whoever controls the budget, because
they are much cheaper than the real deal, but, contrary to their marketing
hype, they often do not replicate everything the real deal does.

These non-IBM printers talked to our 400 by having a PC in the middle.  If
someone turns the PC to some ap other than doing the job of AS400, iSeries,
or whatever, then our IBM system says there is a connection error, and the
printer is waiting for info from the 400, and there is no obvious place to
find and figure out these errors, except at the PC man-in-the-middle.

There are also hardware deals which can emulate the PC, so that a PC printer
can be connected directly to the IBM.
I knew about those, but never actually worked with one.

As we got more & more PC devices into our network, our configuration said
that they were to be started, when the IBM was started.
We got a problem with special forms not same as default forms for everyone
else, which would cause a change forms request to whoever doing the special
forms on the non-IBM printer.  Management wanted IT to remove that request
to change forms, for the users, every time the 400 got rebooted.  We solved
this by calling the reports for those printers the same name as our default
forms, even though they were the special forms.

4 - Page Dimensions
On our 400, we often used compressed print 15 characters to inch sideways,
up to 1`98 print positions sideways on what we called green bar paper.
Similarly, we did vertical print 4 6 and 8 print lines to the inch
downwards.
Most PC printers cannot handle this much.  If our BPCS program, usually with
FL lines to control when to overflow, what is top of page, how long is the
form, etc. tries to output more stuff per page than the PC, the PC printer,
and the #### emulation can handle (any of them) we'd get microscopic print,
with the page rotated 90 degrees, and other weirdness.

We may have been printing no sweat for years, but then someone installs a
printer which needs a different IBM #### printer emulation, and everything
goes to hell, because the old program is calling for print page size which
is incompatible with the replacement hardware configuration.  You have to
know what the new hardware is capable of, and modify the BPCS software
accordingly, so that it functions OK for ALL the different hardware
configurations that your company insists on using.

We had hassles with a printer, come to find out, required certain print
lines on top and bottom of pages to be able to be "grabbed" by the printer
for single sheets, even though we were not using single sheets.  This was
solved by altering page length of actual printing, so that those lines were
left blank, skipped past.

Auto configuration was a security risk.  Some hacker comes along with a
non-standard device,  PC plug & play accepts it, IBM auto-config accepts it,
and now you have rogue output on your system.  So we had limited
auto-config, with frequent human checking to make sure all is well.  But
change in personnel, new guys might not know about this, make unwarranted
assumptions.

5 - BPCS device codes.
I don't remember where this happened, but we had default settings for
printing, inside BPCS, which defaulted to IBM settings, but we had to make
some over-rides to some BPCS settings for non-IBM printers we were using.

When you add some device to the IBM system, we have auto configuration, to
grab the settings which were there via the PC setup.
After adding a display tube, or PC, it worked fine, but with printers, we
had to reboot the 400, a practice we called the tail wagging the dog.  Once
something is up & running, if it aint right, you either have to change
everything manually, or totally delete the printer, fix the settings at the
PC level, calling for a different connection, to let auto configuration run
on a different address, do your darnest to delete it from the original
connection, then reboot IBM again.


Alister Wm Macintyre (Al Mac)
Yes Feb-8 birthday takes me to age 73.
End 2015 I weighed 325 lbs.  Start 2017 I weigh 275 lbs.  That's down 50
lbs.
Panama Papers group:  https://www.linkedin.com/groups/8508998

-----Original Message-----
From: BPCS-L [mailto:bpcs-l-bounces-Zwy7GipZuJhWk0Htik3J/[email protected]] On Behalf Of Arif Inam
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2017 2:32 PM
To: BPCS ERP System
Subject: [BPCS-L] Toshiba Printer on iSeries (AS400)

Hi,


Is anyone printing on Toshiba printer from iSeries? We are trying to
configure Toshiba e-STUDIO 4505AC printer with our iSeries and having issues
with it. Printer is waiting in pending status and not printing anything. We
are on V7R1. I need help in understanding what to define in the following
configuration:


Device class - DEVCLS

Device type - TYPE

Device model  - MODEL

User-defined object - USRDFNOBJ (if defined)


Thank you,


Syed Arif Inam

AS400 Manager

Nice-Pak Products,

New York.
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