lp remote banners

[Paul Pellegrini]

When I changed my printers in sam from being network printer to remote printers I lost my banner pages. Can someone tell me how to active banner pages for remote printers in my HP-UX. My print server is NT4.0

[Stefan Farrelly]

The problem is on your NT box, you need to configure the print Q there. lp passes all the options, such as lp -obanner to the remote server to process.

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Check the printer model in /var/spool/lp/model and also /etc/lp/interface/model.orig

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

Check the printer model in /var/spool/lp/model and also /etc/lp/interface/model.orig

[Paul Pellegrini]

There are no settings on the NT box for the print Q. It simply passes the requests through the print server. When you change from network to remote the /etc/lp/interface/printer_name file is drastically different and the features supported via remote vs. network printers is different at the Unix level. Unix uses lpd to release print files to a remote printer instead of the lp command and limits the options that are available.
I am still looking for help on re-enabling the banner.

[Paul Pellegrini]

The areas /var/spool/lp/model and /etc/lp/interface/model.orig both appear to be configuration information for "network" printers as opposed to "remote" printers. Remote printer config files are written to /etc/lp/interface/printer_name
Still looking for advise on getting back the banners.

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

NT has very little in common with HP-UX and remote printing is one of them. The lp spooler in HP-UX expects to print to a locally connected printer (ie, serial or parallel). HP-UX spooler is based on SysV (not BSD which is why the command is lp and not lpr) and the original specs for SysV did not define remote printing at all. So parts of BSD specs (RFC 1179) were used to create a remote spooling system.

In HP-UX, the remote spooling system passes all the -o options to the remote system for processing. This works perfectly with other HP-UX systems as they process these -o options and prepend the print job with appropriate banners and settings.

Therein lies the problem. NT knows nothing about -o options and ignores them. So you have 2 choices:

1. Seriously question the requirement to use NT as an intermediary between printers and Unix computers. NT was useful as a printer server many years ago but today's network printers support multiple connections and protocols.

2. Create a wrapper for lp which creates the extra banner page. The wrapper might be called lpnt or something similar. It would itself be very similar to a printer model script and it's output is then directed to the NT spooler. NT, like BSD systems, is very simple and expects all the data to be preprocessed, ready for the printer.

This process would also resolve the issue of stair-stepped ASCI files from Unix to NT systems. ASCII files in Unix are:

LF

where LF is just a linefeed. Send this to a printer and all you get is text stairstepped across the page as there is no CR to returne the carriage back tp the beginning of the line. PC (DOS, Windows) ASCII files use two characters (CR+LF) to terminate text lines so these can be sent as is to a printer with the expected results.

[Paul Pellegrini]

Since I don't easily give up, I was playing in my Unix SAM utility -- I am very new to Unix -- and I came across HPDPS (HP Distributed Print Service. I played in here for a while and found that I was able to get the best of both worlds. The HPDPS configuration allows me to send my documents through an NT print server while retaining the Unix LP functionality of banners and -o options. Does anyone else have any experience in thie area - or advise that they can offer pertaining to the use of HPDPS?

[James Harrington]

We have a similar problem. Paul, how did you get HPDPS to recocgnise the -o options? We have tried and failed.