Brother: NDPS Gateway for Novell Gateway®

Section 1: NDPS Overview

With NetWare 5, Novell has released a new preferred printing system called Novell Distributed Print Services (NDPS). It is available for both NetWare 5 (version 2) and 4.1x (version 1). The main differences between the two versions are a few bug fixes, IP printing is only supported in version 2 and Windows® NT can only use version 2 (version 1 does not offer this).

Until now, Novell has had a reputation for being complicated to configure. Using print services has often been a complex task. Initial setup required creating print queues, printer objects and print servers, and then linking them properly. The print server then processed the job from the queue and sent it to the printer.

This document sets out to clarify this printing method and how it relates to Brother printers and MFC's in particular.

The Advantages of NDPS

According to Novell, the advantages are:

Improved overall network performance.
Reduces network print problems.
Reduces administration costs.
Drivers no longer need to be stored on workstations because NDPS downloads the driver to the workstation.

NDPS Printer Agents

The Printer Agent is a core component of NDPS printing architecture. It is a software entity that provides the communication between the client workstation, the server and the physical printer. The Printer Agent replaces the Print Server, Print and Print Queue of queued based printing.

A printer agent is a NetWare Loadable Module (NLM) which runs at the server. It has a 1:1 correlation with the printer. Every agent is associated with only one printer and is represented by an NDS object.

It performs the following services:

Manages print job processing.
Answers queries from network clients.
Generates event notification such as completion of job etc.
Ensures scalability, allowing you to print to a wide range of devices in WANs, LANs.

NDPS Manager

This creates and manages an unlimited number of printer agents.

Note:

You have to create an NDPS manager within an NDS tree before creating server based printer agents. If the NDPS manager controls a printer attached directly to the server, you must load the manager on the server the printer is attached to.

Gateways

A gateway allows NDPS to:

Send jobs to non NDPS aware printers
Send print jobs to non NDPS printing systems such as UNIX, Macintosh, queue based printers and mainframes
Access print systems that require jobs to be placed in queues
Query attributes
Manage the printer

Brother provides a Gateway that provides unique features for Brother Printers and MFC's such as easy installation, configuration and monitoring of Brother network connected devices. See Section 2 for more detailed information about the specific Brother Gateway.

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