HP-UX Printing Questions

[adam carroll_2]

Greetings all -

I am trying to figure out how to do a couple of tasks on an HP-UX server. The first is to make the HP-UX server a printer server. I think I've managed that by starting the lp scheduler. Is that all that's involved? Can the server now accept print requests from other remote servers?

I also need to add a "virtual" printer that will send output to a network socket instead of a physical printer. I haven't been able to find anything close to this. I basically need something similar to the Linux "foomatic" printer here.

It is also important to note that, for portability reasons, I would like to stick with lpd and not delve into the HP Distributed Printing System if at all possible.

So far, I have ran these commands to try and achieve this:
* lpadmin -ptestprinter -v/dev/dlpi0 -mpostscript
Question: Is /dev/dlpi0 the device file I should use? The web page I was reading from made an implication that I could use whichever device file I wanted and one would be created for me, but that did not happen. Should I mknod my own device file?

* accept testprinter
* enable testprinter
* lpsched
* lpstat -r
This reported that the scheduler was running.

The bad part is that I don't really know what I've done :) I *think* I've set up a postscript printer, but I am not sure if the server is acting like a print server, nor am I sure about how to make my new postscript printer print to a socket. Do I need to make a new model file or something to do something like this?

Any help is appreciated!

Peace :)
Adam Carroll

[monasingh_1]

I do not know of "foomatic" printer but in the simple printer server configuration, you configure all the printers on HP machine first and then on clients, configure remote printers where remote printhost is HP machine.

Just enabling lp schedular on HP will not make it print server. You need to have all printers configured on it.

Install jetadmin software (free for HP's web site) for network printers.

I think to configure different printer you can might want to take the help of SAM.

[Bill Hassell]

If lpsched is running then the standard HP-UX OS will act as a Unix print server (which has NOTHING to do with Windows printer sharing).

lpd does not exist on HP-UX as it is a SysV, not BSD Unix flavor. (actually, lpd is a simple wrapper script) You are wise not to mess with DPS as it is far too complicated and unnecessary to setup remote printing.

The lpadmin command has setup a printer called testprinter but it won't do anything. Printers must be connected to a device file and typically need a printer script to make it work. HP-UX has no native Postscript support. The postscript model simply converts plain ASCII files into a Postscript output stream.

There is no lp-to-socket code except for HP's proprietary JetDirect interface (socket 9100).

There are a lot of questions here. Do you have any printers attached to the server? If so, have they been configured? Do they work with the standard lp command?

[monasingh_1]

little clarification further to my previous note: Just starting lpsched will not make HPUX printhost for other clients. you will need to define printers and then other machines can use those queues....