Quote:>Howdy.
>I just set up a brand new HP LaserJet 4M+ and now I want to print to it. I've
>got our main UNIX box printing to it just fine (using JetAdmin), but we've
>got some DEC machines running Ultrix, some Macs, some IBMs running Linux, etc.
>Since JetAdmin doesn't run on these machines, I was wondering if there was
>some kinda way to have each of these machines just sort of "hand off" the
>things they want to print to our main SunOS machine, rather than having to
>set up a queue on each & every one of them.
Hi Jeff--
We've got a lot of HP JetDirect cards, but they're mostly used
by PCs. The older versions of the JetDirect cards only supported Unix
printing from platforms where you could run some HP code (like Sun, or
a few other common platforms). However, the proprietary nature of that
solution bothered me. A better solution, and one that many other Printer
card vendors and 3rd party printer server manufacturers have, is to get
a network card (or print server) for your Laserjet that supports a
"standard" protocol, LPD. I believe this is available (as an OPTION)
from HP on their newest model jet direct cards.
However, if you do have the printer printing from a host that
does have the HP Jetadmin software, you can use LPR/LPD on all of your
other boxes to print to that Unix box (as a remote printer), and your
main box handles it from there. Your main box would have to support
the LPD protocol, to allow the incoming connections, and the other Unix
boxes would have to support LPR (the client side). This may exclude
some non-BSD flavors of Unix. Solaris (which is SysV flavored) uses
lp instead of lpr, but provides an lpr-compatibility option to allow
you to continue using that print protocol; other vendors may or may
not.
On the client machine, you'd need a file, "/etc/printcap", that
is the printer capabilities database. Entries for remote printers are
pretty minimal:
hpjet1|HP Jet Direct Printer of host oswald:\
:lp=:rm=oswald.yourdomain.edu:rp=laserjet1:\
:sd=/usr/spool/hpjet1:mx#0:
The entry above would create (on the client machine) a print queue
referred to as "hpjet1", printing to the Remote Machine "oswald",
where oswald's printer name for the Jet Direct is "laserjet1" (i.e.,
that's the queue name on oswald). The sd parameter is the local
spooling directory where the file is locally stored before being
sent across the net to oswald. The mx#0 parameter is to allow any
size file to be sent, since dumping bit maps to a Laserjet will
possibly exceed the default size allowable.
I hope this is helpful.
- Larry
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