What is NuGenesis UNIFYps? - WKB78971

ENVIRONMENT

• NuGenesis 9 SDMS
• NuGenesis 8 SDMS
• NuGenesis 7.x SDMS

ANSWER

UNIFYps is a service that listens for print jobs received through the Line Printer Daemon (LPD) protocol via the "LPD Service" on a Windows server and directs the print job through a processor from Liberty Systems Inc. This processor converts the PostScript file into a Windows Spool file and sends the job on to UNIFY for processing. The "ps" stands for "PostScript". It was originally developed to handle print reports from UNIX sources. Many customers have NMR instruments that were controlled by UNIX workstations. UNIX prints natively via the LPD protocol and the PostScript printer format. UNIFY does not directly support either LPD or PostScript, so UNIFYps acts as a translation layer in order to capture print reports from UNIX and Linux machines.　

The early implementations of UNIFYps (up through SDMS 6.0) were as a Windows GUI application, not as a service. This meant that customers had to leave a Windows user logon session active all the time in order to process print jobs from UNIX. The implementation was changed to a service model in SDMS 7.0. In NuGenesis 8, UNIFYps was expanded to officially support print jobs from Red Hat Enterprise Linux machines, and unofficially from other Linux distributions, in addition to UNIX machines. Linux has largely supplanted UNIX as the *nix OS of choice among customers, though older systems running on UNIX are still present. Modern Linux systems support several protocols for printing: LPD, Internet Printing Protocol via raw TCP/IP, and IPP over HTTP. UNIFYps does not support print jobs via IPP; only LPD is supported.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

In NuGenesis 8 SR2, it was found that UNIFYps will not work if there is no user logged in to the machine, despite UNIFYps being a Windows service.

The RFC specs for the LPD printer protocol can be found at: https://www.rfc-editor.org/pdfrfc/rfc1179.txt.pdf.