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December 27, 2002
ALIN - Application Layer Internetworking
I just discovered (via Sam Ruby) Rohit Khare's work on application layer internetworking, or ALIN. Rohit gave a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies conference last May and has a powerpoint presentation and some rough notes online. What I've been calling Layer-5 routing, Rohit calls Layer-7 or ALIN. I'll defer to him since he's got the powerpoint done (not to mention that he's probably thought it through more).
Reading Rohit's presentation, I realize I left out a very important feature in my thoughts on ALIN: message store and forward. I was thinking of transport as orthoganal to the idea of ALIN. I still think that maybe it is (at least for the feature set I envision), but Rohit argues that transport can't be ignored because latency is such a huge issue in web services. He's got a point.
Rohit calls out the following companies as being in the "Internet-scale" messaging business: KnowNow (which Rohit founded), Bang Networks, Kenamea, SonicXQ, and Grand Central. If you visit these sites and look at their customer lists, you'll notice that they all sell to a lot of financial institutions and brokerages. This doesn't surprise me. When we were building credit card gateways for First Data Corp. at Excite\@Home, we were using IBM MQ Series to route transaction records among geographically dispersed gateways. Financial institutions have been chasing this problem for years.
09:58 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Using CUPS for DeskJet Printing with a Netgear Print Server
For some time, I've used a Netgear PS110 print server to connect printers with just a parallel port to my home network so that my printers can sit in a more convinient location. Now that I'm using OS X, I was a little worried that it might not work. Turns out it works just fine using CUPS. Here's what I did:
- Connect the DeskJet to the PS110
- Go to http://127.0.0.1:631 to access the built-in CUPS administration tool. Its already running---you don't need to start it.
- Select "Add Printer"
- Select a name, etc. This isn't critical.
- The PS110 speaks LPD, so select LPD printing and enter the URL as lpd://192.168.1.10/P2 where 192.168.1.10 is replaced with the IP number or DNS name of the PS110 and P2 is the name of the queue on the PS110 that the DeskJet is connected to.
- I was using a DeskJet 882C, so I selected New DeskJet when asked. You may need to select something else depending on your printer.
- Print a test page. For some reason, I couldn't print the test page from CUPS, but I printed a test page from Mozilla just fine.
I like this solution because I don't have any other computer in the loop, just a simple appliance. The PS110 has two ports, so you could have two printers. I happen to have a Brother MFC4500 on the other one and, alas, there doesn't appear to be a driver for OS X, so its just faxing at this point.
This wasn't as easy to get going as many things on OS X have been. Over all, I'd say printing is the weakest thing I've seen so far in OS X administration. Everything else has been dirt simple. There are two different ways to configure printers: the Print Center and CUPS. I tried in vain to get the Print Center to work (driver issues). Finding CUPS took some work and searching. The good news is that CUPS is fairly substantial and has some great tools, so better intergration with CUPS (so that there's only one way to configure a printer) could solve this problem.