Distributed Spooling in a Heterogeneous Environment

Distributed spooling systems exist for many homogeneoøs systems. In this paper we describe the overall architecture of a distributed spooling system for a heterogeneous environment. This system allows exchanging jobs among UNIX, VMS, VM/CMS, and MVS operating systems connected by a network which provides the internet protocol suite (tCr/IP). The system's primary purpose is remote printing, but it is easily extensible to serve other purposes. Important design goals are portability, reliability, and user friendliness. Some highlights of the implementation are presented as a case study. We focus on problems which arise especially in heterogeneous environments and explain why homogeneous solutions can hardly be applied to the heterogeneous case. For each of the different systems, there is a more or less common implementation based on the client/server model [Svobodova 1985]. The user interface, however, is modeled specifically for each command language. A critical review of the project's issues and our experiences implementing a distributed heterogeneous system conclude the paper. @ Computing Systems, Vol. 3 'No. 3 ' Summer 1990 449