Care And Feeding
Introduction | Daily Maintenance | Applescript | Variable Media Info
Introduction
Whether one is entrusted with the maintenance of Endnode or simply curious about the technical and practical issues of the installation, one will find the majority of information one needs to properly maintain Endnode in this section of the web site. We repeat; this section contains technical and practical information regarding the maintenance of Endnode it is dry and not very interesting.
Hardware Overview
Endnode (AKA Printer Tree) includes 8 Epson C40UX inkjet printers connected via USB through a Belkin 7 port USB hub to a PowerPC G3 266 Apple Macintosh customized with a Macally PCI to USB card and 160 MB of RAM. Endnode is configured to print only black and white.
Software Overview
The computer runs Mac OS 9.2. The Endnode system runs using Mailsmith 1.5.3 from Bare Bones Software Inc. and custom applescripts written by t.whid.
Software Interaction Diagram
As you can see from the diagram Endnode is a very simple system. The email is downloaded via Mailsmith's autocheck feature every two minutes. Once the messages are downloaded the Save as text script is run saving the messages to text files in the folder disk:messages. Every minute printEm randomly selects one of the saved messages from disk:messages, chooses a random printer, has Mailsmith open and print the message to the random printer, and then moves the message from disk:messages to the disk:done directory.
Very Simple, very easy. The system seems very stable in our tests :-)