Printer configurationfiles on HPUX 11i

[Klaas D. Eenkhoorn]

All,

I'm seaching for a way to findout which remote printers hostname is lost from DNS.
Some hostnames disapear from Windows DNS server without a clue.

What i like to know is, is there a file which holds the configuration of the remote printers which i can browse with grep or cat and extract the hostname and check witch nslookup if the hostname is still known.

Yes i know with lpstat -s i see this configuration bu i am wondering if there are more options to find this information.

Kl@@s

[OldSchool]

in /var/spool/lp/interface, do the following:

grep "PERIPH=" * | grep -v MODEL

will get a list of DNS names (or possibly IP addresses) for each printer

[Tim Nelson]

If it is a "remote" printer (not "network" printer) then lpstat -t is way. SAM would work as well to give you the "hostname/IP" used.

The interface files will only have info "network" printers, those created with /dev/null as the device.

[OldSchool]

what tim said is correct...I wasn't paying enough attention....too used to *not* using remote printers

[Bill Hassell · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately, the config file for remote (and direct cabled) printers is /var/spool/lp/pstatus and it is in binary. My recomendation is to NEVER, EVER use hostnames for remote (or network) printers. For some reason, DNS administrators constantly trash printer entries. They also forget reverse lookup entries. The same is true for network printers -- use hard-coded IP addresses instead.. They should not be changing. If so, you have a very unstable network and I would suggest using serial cables to avoid all the network issues.

[Klaas D. Eenkhoorn]

I think i have to use the lpstat -s option to extract the info i need. Indeed it whould be better to use fixed ip adresses instead of DNS names but our Windows managers use DHCP to configure the printers so IP adresses do change.

Thanks for the thinking !

Kl@@s