--------------------------- LANtronix --------------------------- ETS/EPS --------------------------- Terminal and Printer Server --------------------------- Software Release Notes --------------------------- Version V3.5/7 November 12, 1998 Copyright 1998, Lantronix Release notes are also available using the Lantronix media support and download system or via anonymous FTP from ftp.lantronix.com. Contact Lantronix or your reseller for more information. This document describes the Lantronix Terminal/Printer Server software release. Release Summary =============== V3.5/7 ------ V3.5/7 provides traditional terminal and print server functionality, including the TCP/IP, Novell, Appletalk, Lan Manager and LAT protocols on the ETS4P, ETS8/16, ETS8P/16P and the ETS16PR/32PR platforms. Appletalk, Lan Manager and Novell support is limited to print serving. V3.5/7 provides print server functionality, including the TCP/IP, Novell, Appletalk, Lan Manager and LAT protocols on the EPS2-100, EPS4-100, EPS2P2, EPS4P1, EPS1/2, LPS1, MPS1 and MPS100 platforms. Note that these units are print servers. They will not allow outgoing connections to hosts. V3.5/7 provides terminal server functionality, including TCP/IP, Novell and LAT protocols on the MSS1, MSS100, MSS1-T2 and the MSS485 platforms. Note: V3.5/7 software is not supported on the EPS4/12. V3.5/3 is the last software release for these units. New Features ============ The following is a list of new features in V3.5/7. Support has been added for the ETS16PR and ETS32PR terminal/print servers, the EPS2-100, EPS4-100 and MPS100 print servers and the MSS100 serial server. The ability to perform telnet TTYLOC IAC negotiation (RFC 946) has been added. On the MSS1, MSS100, MSS1-T2 and MSS485, the command CHANGE TELNETDEST [CONSOLE|SERIAL] has been added. This command controls what happens when a user forms a telnet connection to the MSS. The default behavior is to create an incoming telnet session and give the user a local prompt. If the "SERIAL" keyword is specified, the user will be connected directly to the serial port. On single port print servers, i.e. MPS1, LPS1, MPS100 forming a telnet connection to socket 9100 will form a connection directly to the parallel port. Resolved Problems ================= Miscellaneous ------------- When using the source command to execuate a services of commands from a host, if a "!" character was anywhere in the string, it was being treated as a comment character and the rest of the string was not executed. If the PSCONVERT characteristic was enabled on a service and a LPD job was printed, the print job would not be successfully completed and the queue would stall. If ports are given identical names, the queuing system can get confused and will not route requests to the appropriate ports. If a non-unique port name is specified, a warning message is issued. On the MSS family of products, if a serial delay value was specified and then any other server characteristic was changed, the serial delay would revert back to its default value of 30 milliseconds. On the MSS1, MSS100 and the MSS485, do not ask for a username when logging into the MSS from a device attached to the serial port. On the EPS2, correct a problem that could cause data loss and corruption on parallel port two. Appletalk --------- On the MPS100, the NVR initialization routines did not always correctly install the keyword "LaserWriter" as the Appletalk device type. This would prevent Appletalk printing. LAT --- The command CONNECT L" was being interpreted as "CONNECT LOCAL" rather than as "CONNECT LAT". TCP/IP ------ When using DHCP to assign an IP addres to a server, the TCP/IP retransmit limit value could be incorrectly zeroed which would result in intermittent TCP/IP failures on a busy network. When a telnet session from a Linux RedHat 4.1 machine was terminated abnormally, it could leave memory structures for the telnet session allocated. Performing telnet IAC Sup_GA negotiation was not working correctly with a NCR host system. If telnet sessions are active, do not allow the gateway to be set. It must be defined. Known Problems ============== The following problems are known in V3.5/7. Printing directly from a Windows for Workgroups machine is not supported because of a problem in WFW. If the print server is flow controlled by the printer and in turn flow controls the WFW host machine, the WFW host will abort the print job. This means that if the print job is larger than the print server's internal buffer (maximum 4Kbytes) the print job will fail. The only workaround for this problem is to spool the jobs from the WFW machine to a Windows NT machine and print to the print server from there. LPD printing from Solaris machines is problematic due to the way Sun has implemented the Solaris spooling system. This problem has been reported to Sun. Their suggested workaround is "Do not print using LPD from Solaris machines to network based print servers. Instead use the vendor supplied printer interface programs." For Lantronix print servers this is the RTEL software. Please see the RTEL man pages for more information about configuration and use.