Multiple Printers

[Mary Rice]

Hello Forum Members,

We have four identical ColorLaserJet 4500DN printers that sit beside one another in our office. These printers print almost constantly but sometimes one printer is very busy while the one next to it is completely idle. Is there an easy way to move print requests to the idle printers automatically? I've looked at writing a script using lpmove and lpstat but maybe someone knows a third-party print manager that will do this for us.

Thanks for any and all help,
Mary Rice

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

Hi Mary:

There is an advanced 3rd party application that will do just what you need - it's called 'lp'. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

You need to setup these printers as members of a class and then send your printjobs to the CLASS rather than the PRINTER.

lpadmin -p myprinter1 -c C4500DN
This will create the class 'C4500DN' and add myprinter1 to it.
lpadmin -p myprinter2 -c C4500DN
This will add printer2 to the now existing class C4500DN.

You then would print like this:

lp -dC4500DN myfile

Man lpadmin for details.

Regards, Clay

[Jordan Bean]

This shouldn't be a problem if these printers are part of a class, and everyone prints to the class instead of the specific queue.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi again:

You will probably need to run the enable command on the class.

enable C4500DN

[Mary Rice]

Thanks very much guys! I can't believe I completely overlooked such a simple solution. Clay, I guess I deserved that. :-)

Mary Rice

[Rich Wright]

One suggestion is to delete the most used existing printer queue and reuse that name for the class name. Then you do not have to redirect as many application jobs to a different name.