HP remote print to AIX - where are my -o options?

[Bob Brazner]

From an HP server, how can I remote print to an AIX server and have the -o options carried over:
Example: lp -d AIXdest -o option1 -o option2 somefile
In all my tests, the -o options do not appear in the remote AIX queue. Is there a special HP model script that will do this?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The options available to remote printers (as opposed to NetWork) printer are extrememly limited. Do a man rlp and that will show you the options that work or you can examine the interface file in /var/spool/lp; you will find that only a very few options will work. What you can do, is create another print queue on the AIX host using the same physical printer and define a new set of default behaviors.

[Bob Brazner]

My -o options differ with each unique lp request. If I go HP to HP, all the -o options seem to transfer. But, if I go HP to AIX, none of the -o options transfer. I've read the man pages on rlp and I can infer that rlp indeed does not handle anything except -I. So, how is that HP to HP works? Does HP to HP set up some kind of bi-directional exchange of info (above and beyond what's specified in the rlp command), and that HP to AIX is not privvy to such a bi-directional exchange?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I suspect that your HP-to-HP is really what in HP-UX speak is called a "Network" printer whereas your HP-to-AIX is a "Remote" printer. There is a huge difference in the capabilities. In the case of the "Network" printer the interface file is as fully configurable as if it were a locally attached printer whereas the "Remote" printer
is limited in the options that the rlpdaemon supports. Moreover, in a very real sense, even the options sent are merely requests -- these is no guarantee that the hosting machine will honor them.

[Bob Brazner]

Hmm... this is getting very interesting. My HP and AIX target printers were both defined as remotes on my HP source system using the example straight out of the lpadmin man page. On the HP target, when I examine /var/spool/lp/request/queue/cA#####... file, I can see the -o options (encoded using -O (uppercase O)). On the AIX target, when I examine /var/spool/lpd/qdir/xxxxx... file, the only thing close to an option I see is -Hxxxx where xxxx is the uname of the HP source machine.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

HP-UX uses the SysV print spooler which never defined a remote printer facility. rlp was borrowed from BSD but only partially. The definition of HP-UX remote printing is: the remote server must be a SysV implementation to interpret the -o options and the printer script on the remote system must honor these local options. So remote HP-UX to HP-UX works just fine (same model scripts, SysV spooler), but virtually all other servers will either ignore all the local -o options like -olandscape (BSD spooler like WindowsNT and offspring) or the local printer scripts know nothing of HP-UX printer options (like Solaris).

This is a very common problem for HP-UX and while 90% of all the lp options apply only to plain ASCII files, the only way to print as expected is to pre-format all print jobs BEFORE sending them to a remote print server. This is the BSD model. Now what makes all this confusing is that there are remote print servers in the form of LAN cards and boxes for printers. They too are BSD style print servers (no local printer scripts, all -o options ignored). And recently, HP's proprietary JetDirect LAN cards and boxes added BSD print server capability. But that is a step backward for HP-UX because not even a plain ASCII file will print correctly--it must be run through an ASCII file filter, ux2dos, to add the required CR to every LF which is done automatically in local HP-UX scripts.

There are two solutions:

Take an appropriate HP model script and turn it into a special printer filter script. The output of the script is then the processed job which can be fed into lp and a remote printer without any problems.

The other is to disconnect the printer from the server and put in an HP JetDirect card or external box. Then add the printer to HP-UX as a network printer (SAM terminology) or use hppi (HP Printer Installer downloaded for free from HP's web site).